How to manage DNS records for your service
To ensure users can connect to your service, you’ll need accurate Domain Name System (DNS) records and a DNS provider to supply your DNS nameservers.
You can find information on choosing where to host your DNS and how to request nameserver delegation at GDS in the Service Manual.
As part of your DNS strategy and planning you need to ensure:
- your DNS record configuration is reproducible (for example, the DNS records are version controlled or autogenerated)
- you consider DNS availability as part of overall service availability.
For example, publishing.service.gov.uk is published to both Amazon Route 53 and Google Cloud DNS to remove vendor as a single point of failure.
This means that even if AWS has a total outage, users can access parts of GOV.UK by using Google Cloud DNS to resolve addresses, and viewing content that is available in the CDN cache.
Note that if your service availability relies on a single vendor, there is less benefit to deploying DNS to multiple vendors.
When you implement your DNS strategy you should consider using:
- Amazon Route 53 as a cloud DNS web service
- Google Cloud DNS for high nameserver availability
You can read more about service domains and DNS in the Service Manual.