DNS Services for a registrar

Fri Aug 12 12:28:10 UTC 2016

> On Aug 12, 2016, at 1:56 AM, Ryan Finnesey <ryan at finnesey.com> wrote:
> 
> We need to provide DNS services for domains we offer as a registrar.  We were discussing internally the different options for the deployment.  Does anyone see a down side to using IaaS on AWS and Azure?

My big concern would be the current lack of v6 support on AWS for such a deployment.  I suspect it’s coming soon as they just announced IPv6 support on S3 yesterday.

How many zones do you expect to scale to?  I’ve been running a free secondary DNS service for many years on BIND, but moving to something else makes a lot of sense these days.

Do you have a lot of DNS server experience in-house?  There’s a lot of little things that come up along the way.  You really should consider being subscribed to the dns-operations list and asking there as well.

> We were also kicking around the idea of a PaaS offering and using Azure DNS or AWS Route 53.

I like having good control over my own fate, so would prefer running my own service, but plenty of people use hosted DNS at their providers, and there’s plenty of folks who can sell you a service from dyn to neustar with their own cost models.

I would either provide a completely opaque service offering where you retain control of the NS records so can easily move/renumber as you scale up, or consider a solution which can be expanded globally as needed over time.  

I’m able to host ~10k zones in my free secondary service without issues, but to “take the next step” requires decoupling 20 years of history I’m dragging around.

- Jared