EDGECAST ROUTE: THE WORLD’S FASTEST DNS SERVICE
This presentation gives an in-depth explanation about EdgeCast Route, the company’s new globally distributed DNS (Domain Name System) service.
DNS is required to ensure that a web site is available to end users, yet it is often neglected, under-prioritized, or deployed on old and insecure infrastructure. This means that many online enterprises are at risk for degraded performance, malicious attacks, or worse – being unreachable via their domain names.
After an extensive review of the existing DNS market, EdgeCast sees an opportunity to offer enterprise-grade DNS features and functionality with a simple and cost-effective pricing structure. Customers switching from competitors are likely to realize significant savings while benefiting from vastly superior performance and functionality.
Introducing Edgecast Route – the world’s fastest Managed (primary) and Secondary DNS Service.EdgeCast Route is based on DNS technology that – for more than two years – has been directing traffic to the tens of thousands of EdgeCast servers around the world that deliver more than 5% of all web traffic.
Before we dive into the details I want to call attention to some key themes that you will hear throughout the rest of the presentation – the reasons we think you should choose EdgeCast Route as your primary or secondary DNS?Of note, EdgeCast Route is based on DNS technology that – for more than two years – has been directing traffic to the tens of thousands of EdgeCast servers around the world that deliver more than 5% of all web traffic.Best overall valueFastest DNS provider worldwideBest price to performance ratio of any DNS providerIntelligent routingSecureHighly scalable
EdgeCast provides organizations the ability to use EdgeCast Route as either their primary (use to manage zones) – used to administer DNS zones and associated records or secondary DNS.EdgeCast Route leverages EdgeCast’s massive global IP Anycast network, with DNS points of presence in major metros across fourcontinents.
Sometimes the default routing provided by Anycast IP is enough to address their needs.However, sometimes organizations want more control over the way DNS queries to their Web site get routed.In the latter example, EdgeCast provides the ability to do routing based on advanced policies.These advanced policies enable organizations to route DNS queries based on various decision variables.
Edgecast Route has been tested extensively with customer applications using backbone, real-user (RUM), and mobile measurement agents from several third-party performance measurement services - a methodology that helps prevent manipulation by service providers to improve testing results. Both internal and independent tests show EdgeCast Route to be the fastest DNS solution overall on a worldwide basis.These tests showed that EdgeCast Route provides performance improvements from 15% to more than 300% depending on competitor and region.Faster on average than Akamai, Amazon, Dyn, neustar and all the other major (and minor) DNS providers worldwide.
Edgecast Route incorporates extensive security capabilities, with resilience against DDoS attacks, known exploits in traditional DNS software, and a variety of other exposures. With DNS playing such a critical infrastructure role and being a very common attack target, the solution provides enhanced assurance that sites will survive even the most substantial attacks.
EdgeCast route is based on NSD (for "name server daemon") -- an open-source server program for the Domain Name System. It was developed by NLnet Labs of Amsterdam in cooperation with the RIPE NCC, from scratch as an authoritative name server (i.e., not implementing the recursive caching function by design). The intention of this development is to add variance to the "gene pool" of DNS implementations used by higher level name servers and thus increase the resilience of DNS against software flaws or exploits.EdgeCast Route is deployed on a global basis across 4 continents.
When deployed as your primary DNS, EdgeCast Route can be used to create and/or manage your DNS zones.Existing zones can be imported into Route via a REST API.The most common DNS record types are supported.And all configurations – including load balancing (round robin) and failover is done through the EdgeCast Control Center.
EdgeCast Route employs an intuitive Web-based control center for setting up DNS zones.Simple configurations can be up and running within 5 minutes – with DNS changes published in less than 60 seconds – and typically much less.
Traffic for a load balanced hostname is distributed among the servers associated with it – a process known as load balancing. The distribution of requests between multiple servers ensures data availability through redundancy.If a server in a load balancing configuration is unavailable, either due to scheduled maintenance or an unplanned outage, requests to the corresponding hostname will be balanced among the remaining servers. A load balancing configuration allows our authoritative DNS servers to pick between various servers when resolving a hostname to an IP address. The manner in which requests will be distributed between servers is determined by the weight assigned to each server. The EdgeCast Control Center is used to set up load balancing groups, and configuration can be done with/without health checks.
DNS Health Checks are key to ensuring that your site's traffic flows properly is to check at regular intervals that your web servers can provide a response to requests. Our Health Check module is designed to check server health status at regular intervals by sending an HTTP, HTTPS, TCP, or a TCP SSL request from our health checks agents. The worldwide distribution of our health check agents ensures that network latency doesn't result in a misdiagnosis of a server's health state. Each agent will poll a monitored server every 10 seconds. A simple majority consensus will then be used to determine whether traffic should be pulled from a server. They are configured via the EdgeCast Control Center.
A primary/backup relationship can be established between two servers. This type of relationship allows a backup server to take over when the primary server can no longer fulfill its responsibilities (fails a majority of its health checks). This prevents a server outage from impacting site traffic. This process is known as failover.
Secondary DNS is a redundant name service for the domains that you manage.The major point in having a secondary DNS server is as backup in the event the primary DNS server handling your domain goes down.Typically located on separate networks to prevent downtime, secondary DNS ensures that if your network goes down, you will continue to resolve your DNS queries.The ability to employ EdgeCast Route as a secondary DNS is a key part of the offering.
Why go with EdgeCast Route?As previously mentioned, it is based on DNS technology that – for more than two years – has been directing traffic to the tens of thousands of EdgeCast servers around the world that deliver more than 5% of all web traffic.It provides a comprehensive solutionFastest DNS provider worldwideBest price to performance ratio of any DNS providerBest overall valueSupports advanced policy routingSecureHighly scalable
Here is the current pricing structure for EdgeCast RouteCustomers are required to choose the number of billable zones they expect to employThey will also be billed on the number and type of queries, and the number of health checks performed