A Living Architecture

You often hear people say, 'oh, this is a living document,' to indicate that the information is continually updated or edited to reflect changes that may occur during the life of the document. Your infrastructure is also living and dynamic. You make changes, updates or upgrades to address the ever changing requirements of your employees, web visitors, customers, partners, networks, applications and anything else tied to your systems.

This is also true for F5's Reference Architectures. They too are living architectures.

F5's Reference Architectures are the proof-points or customer scenarios that drive Synthesis to your data center and beyond.

When we initially built out these RA's, we knew that they'd be continuously updated to not only reflect new BIG-IP functionality but also show new solutions to the changing challenges IT faces daily. We've recently updated the Intelligent DNS Scale Reference Architecture to include more security (DNSSEC) and to address the highly hybrid nature of enterprise infrastructures with Distributed DNS.

F5’s end-to-end Intelligent DNS Scale reference architecture enables organizations to build a strong DNS foundation that maximizes the use of resources and increases service management, while remaining agile enough to support both existing and future network architectures, devices, and applications. It also provides a more intelligent way to respond and scale to DNS queries and takes into account a variety of network conditions and situations to distribute user application requests and application services based on business policies, data center conditions, network conditions, and application performance. It ensures that your customers—and your employees—can access your critical web, application, and database services whenever they need them.

In this latest DNS RA rev, DNSSEC can protect your DNS infrastructure, including cloud deployments, from cache poisoning attacks and domain hijacks. With DNSSEC support, you can digitally sign and encrypt your DNS query responses. This enables the resolver to determine the authenticity of the response, preventing DNS hijacking and cache poisoning.

Also included is Distributed DNS. Meaning, all the DNS solution goodness also applies to cloud deployments or infrastructures where DNS is distributed. Organizations can replicate their high performance DNS infrastructure in almost any environment. Organizations may have Cloud DNS for disaster recovery/business continuity or even a Cloud DNS service with signed DNSSEC zones. F5 DNS Services enhanced AXFR support offers zone transfers from BIG-IP to any DNS service allowing organizations to replicate DNS in physical, virtual, and cloud environments. The DNS replication service can be sent to other BIG-IPs or other general DNS servers in Data Centers/Clouds that are closest to the users.

In addition, Organizations can send users to a site that will give them the best experience. F5 DNS Services uses a range of load balancing methods and intelligent monitoring for each specific app and user. Traffic is routed according to your business policies and current network and user conditions. F5 DNS Services includes an accurate, granular geolocation database, giving you control of traffic distribution based on user location.

DNS helps make the internet work and we often do not think of it until we cannot connect to some resource. With the Internet of Nouns (or Things if you like) hot on our heels, I think Port 53 will continue to be a critically important piece of the internet puzzle.