AWS Route53 vs Rackspace Cloud DNS

July 8, 2011 in Cloud computing, DNS with 8 Comments

Yesterday, Rackspace announced their new Cloud DNS service. This is clearly(?) a response to Amazon’s Route53 release a while back. With one big difference; Rackspace Cloud DNS is free (in combination with other Rackspace Cloud Products), whereas Route53 is not.

I’ll admit I haven’t tried the Rackspace service (yet), but here’s a quick comparison table anyway. Some questions (about branding and distribution) I couldn’t find answered on the Rackspace information page, so I used the support chat.

  Amazon Route53 Rackspace Cloud DNS
Management API* API*
Distribution Anycast** Anycast***
IPv6 - Yes
DNSSEC - -
Branding - -
RR Types A, AAAA, CNAME, MX, NS, PTR, SOA, SPF, SRV, TXT & “Alias”**** A, AAAA, CNAME, DKIM, MX, NS, SPF, SRV & TXT
Pricing Cheap Free

* Neither Amazon nor Rackspace has a management interface for the DNS services. DNS30 is however availible for Route53.
** 19 locations on 3 continents
*** 3 locations on 2 continents (see comment below)
**** Alias records are used to map resource record sets in your hosted zone to Elastic Load Balancing instances.

If the choice only stood between Route53 and Rackspace I think I’d go with Rackspace, just because of the IPv6 connectivity. But other providers should also be considered, Zerigo for example has an excellent DNS service.

Update: After the comment below by Daniel Morris at Rackspace I tried to contact the chat support again to get the information about the edge locations. Here’s the response:

Agent: I’m sorry but I am not positive I would recommend contacting the support team at 1-877-934-0407 or 0800 054 6345 | +44 20 8734 4345
Agent: I’m sorry for any inconvenience this has caused
Agent: have a great day

Not very impressed wit this fanatical support, to be honest.

  • http://twitter.com/demorris Daniel Morris

    While we have separate authentication API endpoints for the US and UK, we do currently have a globally distributed Anycast DNS network at Rackspace.

  • http://poller.se/ Fredrik Poller

    Good news! Can you give me the specifics? (edge locations etc)

    To bad your chat support didn’t have the correct information.

  • http://www.chadkeck.com Chad Keck

    If I’m not mistaken I believe Rackspace is planning to add a full management interface in their control panel for Cloud DNS in the short-term. Just something to note.

  • http://twitter.com/demorris Daniel Morris

    Chad, thats correct.  As a part of the next phase of this project, we will be completely overhauling the DNS management sections of the cloud control panel.  We will be exposing the full set of capabilities that are available via API, including management of TXT records, TTL settings, import/export and more.

  • http://twitter.com/demorris Daniel Morris

    Apologies for the issues you had getting an answer.  Let me explain the details for you.  Currently, our beta service has authoritative nameservers in Texas, Virginia, and London.  Utilizing anycast, we broadcast the IP addresses for ns.rackspace.com and ns2.rackspace.com from each location, however, we are in the process of deploying additional nameservers globally.

  • http://poller.se/ Fredrik Poller

    No problem, thanks for the clarification!

  • http://twitter.com/dns30 Route 53 UI Tool

    Amazon Route 53 is highly scalable and fast DNS routing service.We have developed a UI tool for this interface – DNS30 Professional Edition.We also have online interface for this application.
    http://www.dns30.com/

  • http://twitter.com/DNSly DNSly

    Our app dnsly.net also provides a user interface for Amazon Route 53 and very soon Rackspace Cloud DNS and other providers.