Cloud Chronicles, Part 3: Growing the Reach – Strengthening the Roots

Let's explore an idea: a cloud-based DNS service to help app delivery across a globally distributed network. What could that service look like? It's fairly obvious that users demand fast, secure, persistent access to their apps, and that the teams delivering these apps are dedicated to providing such access. And while this sounds like a simple concept on the surface-especially when considering something as foundational as a DNS solution-it gets very complex, very quickly, when identifying everything that goes into delivering apps in this manner.

The pressure to meet these requests is real for teams who support applications. Users exhibit notoriously short attention spans when it comes to application load times, and are likely to abandon a site or application if it takes longer than three seconds to load. This is why it's critical to consider how the performance of an authoritative DNS can directly impact user experience. Consider the homepage of a popular website like cnn.com or mlb.com. It takes dozens of DNS requests to properly display everything on those sites. If those requests are 5-10% slower than normal, the user experience will suffer noticeably and may drive users elsewhere. Because of this, the tools needed to deliver these apps must work and work reliably.

But what's the answer if the resources aren't there to manage an on-prem, hardware-based DNS solution? Or, what if that app is a crucial revenue driver, but its present traffic demands don't merit a full-scale data center build-out to support delivery? Tapping into a cloud provider is an option, but there are enough bad experiences with billing surprises from traffic spikes to make anyone on a budget think twice before jumping into a cloud solution without first doing their due diligence.

This presents an interesting challenge: how can a cloud-based DNS solution boost the availability, reliability, security, and performance of an app without breaking anyone's budget at a time when security risks and user demand have never been higher? It starts by checking a few boxes.