on 08-Jun-2017 13:42
tl;dr - BIG-IP DNS provides global load balancing (GSLB), DNS services, and basic DDoS protection features.
By now we all understand the concepts behind load balancing; creating a virtual access point to distribute traffic across multiple resources. Keeping that idea in mind the next question is how do we advertise our application available across separate data centers? BIG-IP DNS (formerly Global Traffic Manager or GTM) first and foremost is a global load balancer for DNS queries. Using similar algorithms for load balancing decision made by BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM), BIG-IP DNS routes your DNS traffic to the best suited datacenter either on premise, co-located, or in your preferred cloud provider. BIG-IP DNS also provides DNS resolution services, including caching and traffic throttling to ensure queries made about your applications are always answered and fast.
To understand BIG-IP DNS, we'll first define a few product terms.
BIG-IP DNS has grown over the years to incorporate many new features, but we'll stick to discussing the core global server load balancing (GSLB) functionality. Let's first take a look at a traditional DNS query (we're assuming no system has example cached):
In this scenario, the BIG-IP DNS provided a faster application experience for the user by determining the region the user resided and provided the fastest performing server's as the IP for the FQDN requested by DNS.
BIG-IP DNS provides more features to enhance the GSLB features including accelerating DNS resolution and acting as a fast secondary DNS server. Below you can learn more about BIG-IP DNS and as always if you have questions or comment please let us know.