Tooling to Help Aggregate DNS Across Multiple Service Providers

Adrian Cockroft turned me on to a DNS aggregation solution the other day while I was working on updating the API definitions for the API providers that are included in my API DNS research. It was a very appropriate day for thinking deeply about aggregate DNS, with the DDOS attack against Dyn going on.

DNS provider redundancy: the idea behind @denominatorOSS - one API/tool for many providers to allow switching. /cc @adrianfcole

— adrian cockcroft (@adrianco)

Denominator  is a portable Java library for manipulating DNS clouds. It has pluggable backends including AWS Route53, Neustar Ultra, DynECT, Rackspace Cloud DNS, and OpenStack Designate. Here is a good post on it from back in 2013, describing it as a multi-vendor interface for DNS. 

There doesn't look to be a lot of activity around the project in the last year, but it provides a good model for what I'd like to eventually see across all the major stops along the API lifecycle. I picture a wealth of aggregate tooling like Denominator that can act as a broker between API service providers and help switch, migrate, and sync between providers whether you are deploying, managing, testing, monitoring, or dialing in your DNS.

As I read the multiple investigations into what happened with the DDOS attack on Dyn last week, it seems relevant to learn more about aggregate DNS API solutions like Denominator. I will spend some time looking for other similar open tooling that is vendor-neutral, as well as vendor-switchable. We are going to need open source circuit breakers like this to help route, switch, migrate, and sync DNS across many service providers in this volatile landscape.