Google Cloud DNS vs Managed DNS Services comparison

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Executive Summary

We performed a comparison between Google Cloud DNS and Managed DNS Services based on real PeerSpot user reviews.

Find out what your peers are saying about Cloudflare, Microsoft, Amazon Web Services (AWS) and others in Managed DNS.

To learn more, read our detailed Managed DNS Report (Updated: July 2024).

Buyer's Guide

Managed DNS

July 2024

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IBM NS1 Connect

Featured Reviews

Michael Wills

Senior Network Systems Engineer at McKesson

Jun 8, 2022

Balances cost and functionality, speeds up provisioning, and reduces the DNS maintenance work drastically

The provisioning is great. They have an API service that is simple to use and very quick. The changes that we make are replicated worldwide in a matter of usually milliseconds, sometimes seconds. They are done very rapidly. That's something that's obviously priceless when we're dealing with things like DNS. It is great as an API-first platform for DNS and application traffic management. It is very simple to use. It allows us to rapidly provision and deprovision things. We are all around happy with the solution. From a metrics standpoint, the solution that we came from had no metrics. So, it has been great. Their service team is excellent in taking the time to provide reports for both growth and strategic planning. It has been great.

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Shikar Singh

Solutions Architect / IT Program Manager at Optum

Mar 1, 2024

Constantly improving and adapting to customer needs

The effectiveness of Google Cloud DNS largely depends on where an organization stands in its cloud journey and its overall technology landscape. For those heavily invested in Google Cloud Platform (GCP) and already embracing cloud solutions, Google Cloud DNS can be rated quite high, ranging from seven to nine out of ten.Deployment times for Google Cloud DNS can vary depending on the complexity of the infrastructure and configuration requirements. For straightforward setups and cloud-ready cases, deployment can typically be completed within a few minutes to an hour. However, in more complex infrastructure scenarios involving extensive configuration, deployment may take longer, possibly spanning days or weeks.

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Vijay Muddu

Manager server admin and security at Vivaconnect

Mar 4, 2024

Cost-effective and helpful in the updation of DNS records

I improve the uptime of my company's website by opting for free DNS-related services offered by Google and other vendors, which are available in the market. You need services like Amazon Route 53, AWS, or DNS Made Easy when you want fast resolutions and updates. I can use some free DNS services like GoDaddy if terms of request come into my website, but its resolution is slow. DNS Made Easy helps me with the DNS query in a very fast manner. DNS Made Easy works very fast if any changes I want to make, especially in scenarios where I change my server ID in the DNS records in GoDaddy. Within a fraction of a second, it globally updates the DNS records so that my new server can reach everywhere. The valuable feature of the product to manage high traffic volume stems from the fact that the DNS resolution part is good and very fast. The DNS updation part is also very fast. The DNS records are very quickly updated. The tool also provides a failover option. With the automatic failover option, users can configure the DNS automatic failover to multiple DNS records, where if one of my nameservers fails, it is possible to switch to another nameserver. I can add multiple IPs to my single domain, and if one of my IPs fails, it can use the automatic failover for my present IP. The product provides help during failovers and helps add multiple nameservers. The tool updates DNS records very fast while also serving the DNS queries at a fast rate. The GoDNS feature of the product has impacted my company's global website performance since it works at a very fast rate. As soon as you update any of the IPs, the GoDNS feature works at a drastically super fast speed. If I want to change my website's IP right away, the GoDNS feature takes only 10 seconds to update the IPs at a global level. The API integration is not an area I used to streamline our company's DNS management process since I prefer to use the dashboard manually. The product is very cost-effective compared to other products in the market, like AWS or Amazon Route 53. The transition time offered by the product is super fast. Those people who don't want to spend much money on cloud services offered by AWS or opt for other third-party services that may be very expensive can opt for DNS Made Easy since it is a fast and cost-effective solution. I rate the tool an eight out of ten.

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Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:

Pros

"We find that the low latency access to DNS queries has a direct effect on the customer experience. Visiting a site, whether it's an AdTech-based solution or marketing tech, the fact that whatever we're rendering on a page can be rendered better than the industry standard, in terms of time, ensures a better user experience."

"The Filter Chain is one of the most valuable features, for geo-load balancing and geo-fencing. The Filter Chain is the most useful because it allows us to do several things. With geo-fencing we can redirect a particular user to a particular answer. That's very valuable for us. Filter Chains with monitoring is our strategy to provide redundancy."

"One of the features that is non-standard and that is very useful is the filtered DNS. We have set up our external VPN, which is what all our employees connect through, to use this feature. It's geolocation-aware. In that way, for India we set it up so that these are the servers that should be supporting things, and in the UK these servers, in the U.S. these servers, and in Sweden these ones."

"Monitoring is really important for us. We really care about reliability, and we want to make sure that we can remove some points of presence in our sector and in our edge network really fast when we experience any problems. So, monitoring that NS1 provides for DNS is really important for us."

"For starters, it integrates with Terraform and a lot of our infrastructure is effectively built out using Terraform. That makes all this stuff extremely easy... when we deploy, all the entries are created and configuration is done."

"The provisioning is great. They have an API service that is simple to use and very quick. The changes that we make are replicated worldwide in a matter of usually milliseconds, sometimes seconds. They are done very rapidly. That's something that's obviously priceless when we're dealing with things like DNS."

"We leverage two things from Managed DNS that we couldn't do with any other solution. One is their filter chain technology, which allows us to shift some of the intelligence we need for the traffic steering to the DNS. The second one is data sources, which enables us to manipulate multiple records simultaneously using NS1's internal message DOS. In our case, we are trying to direct the traffic in over 150,000 different NS1 records to an arbitrary set of repeating responses."

"Everything we download into our observability platform so that we can also track any changes in traffic behavior or things like that is also something that we use quite a lot. I'd say traffic management, the speed of updates, and observability are the top three things that we use."

More IBM NS1 Connect pros

"The scalability is good."

"The tool is well integrated. We don’t need the interface of another provider. The product helps me manage my domain and write in Google Cloud."

"The initial setup process is easy."

"It is a scalable solution."

"Stability-wise, I rate the solution a ten out of ten."

"Google Cloud DNS continues to evolve based on customer feedback and technological advancements."

"It is a very robust and stable solution."

Cons

"When we first deployed, we flipped the switch, and it didn't work as well as we expected. It wasn't a complete outage, but we had issues in some places with some customers. The NS1 team went out of their way to resolve it on Thanksgiving. We have a post about it on our blog. We called it "Black Thursday.""

"We use the geo load balancing functionality and there are a couple of things that are helpful there. But the language itself is something we had to get used to a little bit. Some of my folks made a few mistakes in rolling out the Filter Chain...The Filter Chain setup is a bit hard to grasp at first. It would also be nice to have a way to simulate changes in addition to staging."

"There could maybe be additional ways to manage traffic. There are no major improvements we're looking for. It's a very complete solution."

"I would love to see improvement in the testing capabilities they provide. They have a simulate-filter feature so that you can simulate how your traffic would flow, based on their Filter Chains. I believe that was shut off for quite some time. Having that as a way to test our load-balanced CDN structure would be fantastic."

"The reporting metrics are great from an API standpoint, but it would be a little bit nicer if there was some type of dashboard around that. There should also be some type of reporting that's more executive-level focused."

"The Filter Chain simulation is really good in the UI, but it would be nice to have something similar in the API so that we could simulate and test things before we deploy them."

"We care about monitoring and telemetry work, and NS1 provides a pretty good system for monitoring. We can monitor our endpoints and points of presence around the world. If there are any issues, we can easily remove them from our network, but this area needs some improvement because it is not always reliable in NS1. In the past, we had a number of false-positive cases when the monitoring system told us about some problems in our infrastructure that were not true. NS1 is improving the system, and we are constantly talking about this with them. I know that they are releasing a new version of their monitoring system, which is really important for us, but this is a different area where we would expect them to improve."

"We use our client in our infrastructure to communicate with NS1. This client is a bit complex in the way that it is set up. NS1 has their own client solution that you can deploy into your platform to do this, but even that is a bit complex. So, I would like a very simple, thin, light API agent that we can deploy into our platform to communicate with NS1. That would be welcome."

More IBM NS1 Connect cons

"The UI is tricky to understand for people who have not worked with DNS records. People with little to no experience with DNS records can find it hard to understand. For example, you need to know the hallmarks to input records since they need to be matched in a specific format."

"Migrating away from Google Cloud DNS can be difficult."

"The UX of the product is an area with certain shortcomings where improvements are required."

"It needs to provide better integration."

"The solution's price could be better."

"The cost of using Google Cloud DNS can be relatively high compared to other options, especially considering the cloud environment."

"The tool fails to offer load-balancing options compared to products like Azure or Amazon Route 53."

Pricing and Cost Advice

"We pay about $30,000 a month. We used to pay about $20,000 with Dyn every month, for lower volume than we're doing right now, but it had none of the features that we have available with NS1, so it was worth it for us. It seems competitive for us, given that we're doing 4.5 billion requests."

"From a cost standpoint, it's certainly not the most expensive out there, and it's also not the cheapest, but it does well to balance the cost and the functionality/reliability."

"Everything can always be cheaper, but as it is today the pricing is fair."

"The cost of this product is one of the reasons that we chose it."

"NS1's pricing is much more aggressive than its competitors in the market and you get more value out of what you pay for it."

"The cost of using Google Cloud DNS can be relatively high compared to other options, especially considering the cloud environment. I would rate it 6 out of 10. Cheaper alternatives might be desirable, but the decision depends on various factors such as vendor lock-in, organizational adaptability, and alignment with other technologies in use."

"It is expensive but cost-effective."

"I am not sure about the pricing. However, I can give you a rough estimate which is like ten cents per month per zone."

"The product is expensive."

"The tool offers paid services at a very cost-effective rate."

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Computer Software Company

22%

Financial Services Firm

14%

University

Comms Service Provider

Computer Software Company

16%

Media Company

Comms Service Provider

Manufacturing Company

No data available

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

No data available

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about NS1 Managed DNS?

For starters, Managed DNS from NS1 is an easy way to get the job done. Whether you're a novice or a pro, Managed DNS ...

See all answers

What do you like most about Google Cloud DNS?

Google Cloud DNS continues to evolve based on customer feedback and technological advancements.

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Google Cloud DNS?

The cost of using Google Cloud DNS can be relatively high compared to other options, especially considering the cloud...

See all answers

What needs improvement with Google Cloud DNS?

Google Cloud's backend network infrastructure is constantly improving and adapting to customer needs. They lead innov...

See all answers

What do you like most about Managed DNS Services?

It is a very robust and stable solution.

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Managed DNS Services?

The product is a very cost-effective tool. The tool offers paid services at a very cost-effective rate.

See all answers

What needs improvement with Managed DNS Services?

The tool fails to offer load-balancing options compared to products like Azure or Amazon Route 53. The tool needs to ...

See all answers

Comparisons

Cloudflare vs IBM NS1 Connect

Compared 35% of the time

Akamai Edge DNS vs IBM NS1 Connect

Compared 25% of the time

Amazon Route 53 vs IBM NS1 Connect

Compared 14% of the time

Neustar UltraDNS vs IBM NS1 Connect

Compared 9% of the time

Hurricane Electric Free DNS vs IBM NS1 Connect

Compared 5% of the time

More IBM NS1 Connect Competitors

Quad9 vs Google Cloud DNS

Compared 52% of the time

Cloudflare vs Google Cloud DNS

Compared 29% of the time

Amazon Route 53 vs Google Cloud DNS

Compared 8% of the time

Azure DNS vs Google Cloud DNS

Compared 3% of the time

Cisco Umbrella vs Google Cloud DNS

Compared 3% of the time

More Google Cloud DNS Competitors

No data available

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

IBM NS1 Connect

July 2024

Download IBM NS1 Connect product report

Buyer's Guide

Google Cloud DNS

July 2024

Download Google Cloud DNS product report

Buyer's Guide

Managed DNS

July 2024

Download Managed DNS Services product report

Also Known As

NS1 Managed DNS, NS1

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IBM

Google

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DNS Made Easy

Overview

Why

In a 24/7 world, customers demand applications, websites, and content that load instantly and are always on. When those connections are unreliable or slow, businesses don’t meet customer expectations, causing customers to leave. When that occurs, revenue may suffer.

What

IBM NS1 Connect delivers the high-performance, reliable, secure network connectivity that businesses need to meet increasingly sophisticated customer expectations. Leveraging a global network with a 100% uptime SLA, IBM has the capacity and scale to meet the needs of any business. IBM NS1 Connect takes performance to the next level, powering the sophisticated needs of enterprises with complex network infrastructures.

How

IBM NS1 Connect provides network connectivity solutions that give networking teams the visibility, control and automation needed to help ensure your business stays online by steering traffic to the ideal network connections for any given moment. IBM NS1 Connect also enables IT teams to identify network performance anomalies through deep insights into DNS data flows, allowing them to identify configuration problems or network issues that affect performance so they can quickly resolve them.

Details

IBM NS1 Connect is a managed service that provides authoritative, premium DNS and advanced, customizable traffic steering that improves application performance and network resilience. Revenue-generating applications require authoritative DNS resolution to keep critical applications and websites online. Unless your DNS infrastructure is always-on and resilient, network reliability and user experience will suffer, your network reliability may suffer, resulting in poor user experiences if revenue-generating critical applications and websites are not online. IBM NS1 Connect’s always-on, API-first architecture provides fast, secure connections to users anywhere in the world with premium DNS and advanced, customizable traffic steering. It also enables your IT teams to efficiently monitor networks, deploy changes and conduct routine maintenance.

IBM NS1 Connect uses the Domain Name System (DNS) to ensure that websites and applications are:

Online, all the time: Global network with 100% uptime SLA and DDoS protection
Fast: Top tier response and propagation times, custom traffic steering to optimize connections
Cheaper to run: Far less expensive than self-hosting
Automation friendly: API-first platform with Ansible/Terraform integrations and support for Pliant rapid network automation
Easier to troubleshoot: Unique DNS data insights offering

Designed for enterprises looking to optimize their DNS performance, IBM NS1 Connect is a managed service delivering authoritative DNS and advanced traffic steering that improves application performance and network resilience and provides fast, secure connections to users anywhere in the world. NS1 Connect streamlines DNS management by automating both simple and complex DNS configuration tasks via API and preconfigured integrations, so you can spend more time on higher-value work.

IBM NS1 Connect is delivered through our unified delivery platform. The cloud-based platform gives networking teams the visibility, control and automation needed to help ensure your business stays online by steering traffic to the ideal network connections for any given moment. IBM NS1 Connect solutions also enable IT teams to identify network performance anomalies through deep insights into DNS data flows, allowing them to identify configuration problems or network issues that affect performance so they can quickly resolve them.

For enterprises looking to further optimize DNS performance, IBM NS1 Connect offers rich DNS data analytics to streamline the identification of the root cause of anomalies within traffic.

IBM NS1 Connect Features

Global anycast DNS network: Enjoy fast connections to consumers around the globe through an anycast network with 26 points of presence (PoPs).
100% uptime SLA on DNS resolution: Maximize uptime and revenue generation with resilient, always-on, authoritative DNS.
API-first architecture: Integrate and automate workflows with NS1 Connect's well-documented API; every line of code starts as an API call, all functionality is available through the API.
Real-time user monitoring (RUM)-based traffic steering: Uses real-time intelligence on network performance and availability to direct DNS connections to the best available application resource; the widest range of filter options and data sources in the industry, not data that is extrapolated from sampling; the most flexible, granular controls for your network.
Built-in resilience: Add a single-tenant, redundant DNS layer and manage it from a single control plane as your primary DNS.
Managed DNS for China: Improve performance for the Chinese mainland by segmenting traffic with NS1 Connect’s Managed DNS for China.
DNS insights: Get a better understanding of DNS traffic patterns by mining your DNS data to identify security issues, misconfigurations and performance issues.
DDoS protection: Cap your query-based spending with protection against unexpected surges in traffic from distributed denial-of-service attacks.
Uptime monitor: Quickly identify issues and automatically adjust DNS traffic steering configurations with native health check alerts.
DevOps tool integrations: Preconfigured integrations with leading DevOps tools including Ansible and Terraform to help automate routine maintenance, manage data sources and feeds.
Propagation speed: fastest propagation in the industry, measured in seconds not minutes; worldwide propagation in under five seconds.
Independence: neutral arbiter between infrastructure services (CDNs, clouds).

IBM NS1 Connect helps enterprises modernize and optimize networking infrastructure to provide customers with faster connections to websites, applications, services and content.

Google Cloud DNS is a scalable, reliable and managed authoritative Domain Name System (DNS) service running on the same infrastructure as Google. It has low latency, high availability and is a cost-effective way to make your applications and services available to your users. Cloud DNS translates requests for domain names like www.google.com into IP addresses like 74.125.29.101. Cloud DNS is programmable. You can easily publish and manage millions of DNS zones and records using our simple user interface, command-line interface or API.

DNS Made Easy's Managed DNS service provides everything you need to keep your DNS online. All Managed DNS services are configured through our intuitive control panel, APIs, or with the many tools that have been developed to utilize our REST API.

Sample Customers

Avast Software, Bloomberg L.P., BBC, Carfax, CNBC LLC, Deloitte Consulting LLP, Disney Streaming, Dropbox, EBAY Inc, Gannett Media Corp, Salesforce, Wayfair, Workday

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