Three Reasons You Should Choose Anycast DNS
The Domain Name Service is an essential part of the complex system that lets users connect to your website or application. It allows users to put a human readable URL — like cartika.com — into their browser and be connected to the server represented by that address. Essentially DNS translates URLs into IP addresses; it can be thought of as the Internet’s address book. Without DNS, there would be no way for users to connect to your site unless they already knew its IP address. Learn More about Cartika AnyCast DNS Because it’s so crucial to the functioning of the Internet, it’s essential that DNS is fast, reliable, and secure. Consider what would happen if it took 10 seconds for the DNS system to return an IP; your site would be slow. Consider what would happen if the DNS servers went down; your site wouldn’t be available at all. These risks are part of the reason the Cartika offers Anycast DNS services. To understand Anycast DNS, it’s best to compare it to traditional Unicast systems. Unicast is what it sounds like: there is a single server that holds the information (or 2 servers in a round robin formation). Obviously, there are problems with the Unicast approach. If the server goes down, the service will be unavailable (if one of 2 servers goes down, 50% of the requests will be unavailable). If the server is a long way from the user, the round-trip time will be considerable, and the information slow to arrive. Anycast helps overcome these problems by ensuring that there are many servers with the same information. Even better, using some clever routing technology, Anycast makes sure that requests are routed to the nearest reliable server, ensuring that response times are kept to a minimum. Here’s why you should choose AnyCast for your Domain Name Service.
It's Fast
AnyCast DNS puts domain name information on multiple servers all over the world and it routes requests to the nearest server, reducing latency by a significant margin. Anycast systems also load balance between the servers. If any server becomes overloaded and unresponsive, requests are simply routed to another server, meaning the performance of DNS requests is not dependent on any single machine.
It's Reliable
Anycast DNS is inherently redundant. This helps with performance as we’ve already discussed, but it also helps make sure that the system is always available. If a system administrator trips over a cable in one data center — knocking the DNS server offline — it won’t impact the responsiveness of the system because no single machine or data center is essential to the ongoing reliability of the system as a whole.
It's Secure
Because Anycast DNS servers are redundant and geographically dispersed, they’re much more resilient to denial of service attacks than standard DNS arrangements. It’s almost impossible for an attacker to successfully target Anycast hosts. Because DNS is so important to offering a low-latency service to your users, you should choose Anycast DNS for its reliability, its performance, and its enhanced security. Learn More about Cartika AnyCast DNS Image: Flickr/Mishel Churkin
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