Latency is the key differentiator when it comes to application performance on the internet. Reduced latency accelerates the delivery of apps. DNS resolving is the first step towards application delivery and it involves a series of steps.
Prior to Anycast DNS, the DNS servers responsible for resolving users’ DNS requests were sitting continents away from many users, contributing to the high latency and slow delivery of applications. Later, Anycast DNS fixed this high latency for DNS resolution by hosting identical DNS servers on all continents and in all countries with the same set of DNS records.
What makes GeoDNS different from Anycast DNS?
While Anycast DNS reduces the time taken for DNS resolving, GeoDNS goes one step further and drives user traffic to the closest application server. GeoDNS uses the IP address of the user from whom the DNS request is received, identifies the IP location, and serves a unique response according to the country or region of the user.
Let’s say an application is hosted in New York, Singapore, and London. Users accessing the application from Brazil are directed to New York, users from Asia are directed to Singapore, and users from Europe are directed to London.
GeoDNS distributes traffic across the globe based on the user’s IP location and thus serves as a geographic load balancer. It also prevents global outages of an application because one specific region’s application crash will not affect users in other regions.
GeoDNS with ManageEngine CloudDNS
ManageEngine CloudDNS has authoritative name servers available in all vantage points across the globe, running on the Anycast network. It supports GeoDNS with different targeting options, such as the continent, country, region, IP address, and autonomous system number (ASN).
GeoDNS: Geolocation targeting makes it possible to customize the DNS response according to the continent, country, and region of the user. ManageEngine CloudDNS looks for EDNS Client Subnet information from the DNS query and uses it for geolocation routing, which provides higher accuracy.
IP filtering: Enable IP-subnet-based routing to achieve better latency and security.
ASN filtering: Control routing to specific network groups with ASN-based closest routing.
Sign up for a free, 30-day trial of ManageEngine CloudDNS and try GeoDNS. Our free edition with the GeoDNS and Filter add-ons helps you build your own geolocation-based load balancing and content delivery network.
