Today, we are excited to announce the General Availability of Azure DNS. As a global service, it is available for use in all public Azure regions.
We announced the Public Preview of Azure DNS at the Ignite conference in May of last year. Since then the service has been used by thousands of customers, whose valuable feedback has helped drive engineering improvements and to mature the service.
With this announcement, Azure DNS can now be used for production workloads. It is supported via Azure Support, and is backed by a 99.99% availability SLA.
As with other Azure services, Azure DNS offers usage-based billing with no up-front or termination fees. Azure DNS pricing is based on the number of hosted DNS zones and the number of DNS queries received (in millions). General availability pricing applies from 1 Nov 2016, until that time the Preview pricing discount of 50% continues to apply.
Key Features and Benefits
Azure DNS enables you to host your DNS domains and manage your DNS records in Azure.
Hosting and managing your DNS in Azure provides the following benefits:
- Reliability – Azure DNS has the scale and redundancy built-in to ensure high availability for your domains—and is backed by our 99.99% uptime SLA. As a global service, Azure DNS is resilient to multiple Azure region failures and network partitioning for both its control plane and DNS serving plane.
- Performance – Our global network of name servers uses ‘anycast’ networking to ensure your DNS queries are always routed to the closest server for the fastest possible response.
- Ease of use – Your DNS zones and records in Azure DNS can easily be managed via the Azure Portal, Azure PowerShell, or cross-platform Azure CLI. Application integration is supported via our SDK or REST API.
- Security – Azure DNS benefits from the same authentication and authorization features as other Azure services, including the ability to configure multi-factor authentication and role-based access controls.
- Convenience – Hosting your DNS in Azure enables you to manage your Azure applications and their DNS records in one place, using a single set of credentials, with a single bill and with end-to-end support.
Key features of Azure DNS include:
- All common DNS record types—Azure DNS supports all of the DNS record types most commonly used in customer domains: A, AAAA, CNAME, MX, NS, PTR, SOA, SRV and TXT. (SPF records are supported via the TXT record type, as per the DNS RFCs.)
- Easy migration – Migrating your existing domain hosting to Azure DNS is quick and easy using our zone file import feature, which enables existing DNS zones to be imported into Azure DNS in a single command. This feature is available via Azure CLI on Windows, Mac and Linux.
- Fast record propagation – When you create a new DNS record in Azure DNS, that record is available at our name servers in just a few seconds. You can verify name resolution and move on to your next task without having to wait.
- Record-level access control – As you would expect, Azure Resource Manager’s role-based access controls can be applied to restrict which users and groups are able to manage each DNS domain. In addition, these permissions can be applied on individual DNS record sets. This is particularly useful for large enterprises, in which shared zones are common, enabling different teams to self-manage their own DNS records without having access to records owned by other teams.
Third-Party Support
Men & Mice is a leading supplier of DNS, DHCP and IPAM (DDI) software solutions for enterprise networks operating on diverse and distributed platforms. Deployed on top of existing network infrastructure, the Men & Mice Suite consolidates hybrid environments and offers comprehensive tools for managing large portfolios of DNS domains and IP address blocks, via a powerful user interface or via the robust Men & Mice APIs.
The Men & Mice team has been working with the Azure DNS team during the Azure DNS Preview to implement full support for Azure DNS in the Men & Mice Suite. This combination offers customers with large domain portfolios the flexibility and power of the Men & Mice Suite for large-scale DNS management together with the low cost, convenience, availability and performance of hosting their domains in Azure DNS.
Magnus E. Bjornsson, CEO of Men & Mice, says: “We are proud partners of Microsoft and embrace the opportunity to join forces with this leader in the field of IT. Our mutual collaboration enhances the value of the open and adaptable Men & Mice Suite to our customers. We look forward to continuing the development of third-party support products in close cooperation with Microsoft.”