IBM NS1 Connect Reviews

We use Managed DNS to steer traffic for our API. It handles customer-facing records and the upstream selection logic. 

Managed DNS enabled us to build what we have built. No other DNS solution could do what NS1 is doing as efficiently and developer-friendly as needed. When we chose NS1 in 2014, we were selecting from a bunch of other vendors and potential solutions. We were about ready to give up and develop a homegrown DNS solution because we were not happy with everything that existed. By that, I mean every possible DNS provider around the world. No other solution could handle our load, so we were thinking about building our own when we were introduced to NS1. 

Our use case is customized. They developed custom features for us like Managed DNS features filter-chain technology. NS1 has a logic that isn't possible to express with other filter chains. They created a filter that merges using custom logic. It improved our DNS response times in general. We migrated from Route 53 to NS1, and the response time works pretty well for us.

We are a marketing platform with a pretty wide range of customers around the world, from small businesses, like mom and pop shops that sell shirts, to enterprises like Salesforce or VMware, on the B2B side. Our JavaScript tags and our servers on the customer side generally have to answer requests very quickly, always be available, and not lose any data. Among our products is advertising, and that side is required to answer requests that come in from around the world. Usually they're geo-distributed when they come to us. There are many millions of requests a second that we need to handle.

On the customer side, our use case is simple. Requests coming in from an end user, from their browser, need to be routed to the closest endpoint so that the latency is consistently low. The other requirement is that if one of those regions, in a very rare occurrence, is experiencing problems, we need to be able to clear traffic to a secondary or tertiary region to avoid downtime. In that situation, a little bit more latency is fine, but downtime would not be. To do this, we've always used global service load balancing, or DNS anycast, to an extent.

NS1 has greatly reduced DNS maintenance work in our organization. I used to have to log in just to do user-provisioning. That would be something that took me an hour every time we needed to add or remove a couple of users from the old account. With Okta, I never have to deal with that anymore. And during failures, logging in to the account and searching for what was wrong was pathetic when we were using Dyn. With NS1, the interface is pretty fast.

For example, the other day we had an account customer complaining to us that for certain records we were serving, the necessary certificate was expired. I looked into it and it was because it was being sent to our old CDN vendor and I needed to figure out where this stuff was serviced. I went into NS1 and saw that the record name did not have any traffic on NS1. Instead, it was a record name served via Route 53 on a different account. I could not have done that inside Dyn because there was no reporting breakdown on a per-record or a per-node level. In this case, I just removed an entire DNS. The only thing that was left was Route 53 so I could go directly into Route 53 without losing my mind. It took me about 15 minutes while sitting on the couch to fix it. It easily saves us hours every month. And I rarely log in to NS1 anymore because it just works.

We do less manual stuff now. For instance, to deploy a new region for the advertising side of our business, it would take a lot of very manual work to add records. Now we can just Terraform it. That process has gone from taking the relatively long period of an entire day to being able to Terraform, apply, and be done with it. We don't create new regions very often, but if it has to be done manually it's prone to errors and takes a long time. Now, instead, it's automatic and there's no potential for errors anymore.

Going with NS1 has also improved the user experience for our users. We had more than one situation in which Dyn probes were monitoring from across the ocean and they would cause the data center not to be the one servicing requests anymore. That would cause an increased latency for our end-users and would make the experience worse for our customers. Now that I can select the probes and make sure that the ones that detect if something is up or down are the ones that are relevant for the user experience, that doesn't happen anymore.

We use Managed DNS, and we also partially use functionality from some of their other products such as Pulsar. We generate a DNS map and upload it to NS1 using their API to propagate to their service. Then, we use Managed DNS to find the optimal route for our users to connect to the closest point of presence for them.

We use NS1 as software as a service. We are not having anything on-prem. It is a public cloud from our point of view. We are just using their cloud solution or their service. We are not installing it in our data center. They provide us with an API for us to talk to their cloud implementation.

Telemetry is something that we really care about. We care about the reliability of our edge network, and telemetry services are something we highly utilize. We use it through the NS1 API to make sure we have our dashboards and alerts configured correctly to have visibility in real-time over what's happening with our edge network. This way, we can easily and quickly react if needed or in some cases, act in advance to re-steer and re-adjust our traffic.

We're using Managed DNS with other functionality from NS1, so it improves the latency for our end users. So, we can steer traffic to better locations for users. It is not just based on geographical location closeness. It is based on real user metrics for these users. We also need fewer tools for DNS iterations in DNS management. So, we can have it fully automated by using our code and automation tools that we can build on top of NS1 API.

We actively use its Pulsar Active Traffic Steering feature. We cared the most about performance and latency for our users, and we have been getting significant improvements, especially for some of the corner cases at some of the unusual geographic locations where our users are. We have better performance with good efficiency. It did not reduce our costs, but our users have a better experience. It has resulted in better work.

In case of incidents or events for our points of presence, we are able to steer our users to a better location with RUM DNS, which is a part of the Pulsar product. So, we can provide better latency for them in comparison to simple anycast or geolocation traffic.

We use several DNS maps for the traffic distribution between our points of presence in the edge network. For some of these cases, to decrease the load on our network in a location where we may have limited network capacity, we can actually distill some portion of traffic, but it is less important for us. In such a case, we can avoid potential reliability incidents and bring availability, which eventually can improve our uptime.

Pulsar has saved money on CDN optimization. For some of our use cases, we need to distribute a significant amount of content between our users. So, we can use this functionality by having several route maps to route this content to better locations.

It has absolutely improved our DNS response times. We have seen significant improvements for some corner cases with geolocations that have unusual network connections to magistral lines. For some of the use cases, we have seen more than 10% improvement in our latency after we started using the RUM DNS functionality of Pulsar. We have latency improvements of more than 10% in selected regions.

It has reduced the DNS maintenance work in our organization. We have fully automated tools around NS1 API. So, to do any maintenance, by using the NS1 product, we can easily drain traffic in our point of presence to quickly re-steer our users to other locations. It is fully automated on our site so that we do not spend a lot of engineering time preparing our edge network for maintenance. This preparation time counts towards maintenance time, so we can save a lot of time on this.

We automated the entire workflow on our site. Its automation has absolutely enabled us to assign staff to other work. Automation is always good, and we can reinvest the time of our engineers.

Managed DNS helped improve our end-user experience. It reduced our latency dramatically, and our users' experience is much better now. Latency is not the only metric that it has impacted. It has also impacted reliability. We didn't have any major incidents while using NS1 all this time. Our company's SLA is 99.99%, and we can easily maintain it with NS1.

We use NS1 to serve our public DNS and we have around 500 domains that we service through it. It is the public resolver for our website and various other entities we own, and it has been pretty good.

The solution is hosted by NS1. 

We have done some DNS load balancing through NS1 and, using the Filter Chain offering, it has been very straightforward. That's what really sets them apart from their competitors. It's very simple to do and very powerful, reliable, and accurate.

In addition, we haven't had any issues at all with uptime when there is a DDoS attack. When we have been the subject of an attack, NS1 has been up and stable for us, as well as performant. On top of that, it has been able to provide us with pretty good details of what kinds of attacks we have been subject to and what NS1 was doing at the time. Even if we are undergoing DDoS attacks, NS1 will still serve DNS for us.

We have also seen an improvement in our DNS response times compared to previous vendors we used that had had some churn on their response times.

NS1 has also reduced DNS maintenance work for us. Being an e-commerce platform, every millisecond counts for a customer, and we definitely struggled there. We do a lot of testing and monitoring of response times and, in other solutions, we were seeing that our DNS responses would be flapping from time to time, meaning sometimes they'd be really fast and sometimes they'd be really slow. In a dashboard or graph view, you'd see spikes, a screen full of mountains, things going up and down, up and down. But NS1 gives us a nice flat line, because it's always performant and fast and that's what we want to see. Every millisecond we can shave off is better for business.

We have also saved time when it comes to manual processes because NS1 is API-first. That means we can automate records, as needed, as part of other processes. And from time to time, as part of troubleshooting, they have a nice feature where you can see if there is a record or multiple records that get an abnormal amount of queries against them. You can see that granularly, down to the actual record view. That is something you can't do on a lot of platforms. The insight we get is really good compared to other solutions.

Another benefit is connected to the fact that we have some FTP servers that partners of ours use to send and receive files. Those servers are fronting several backend servers, although the partner wouldn't know. They connect to one endpoint and, from their point of view, it's just one server, but it's actually several servers. With the other solutions we've had, if maintenance was needed on a backend server, the partner would notice that the server was down. With NS1's Filter Chains and health checks and monitoring all built-in, we can take servers like that out of service and the partner would never know because NS1 just routes them to a healthy server. That kind of stuff is extremely important for us.

We basically use their NS1 Managed DNS service as a secondary DNS server. So essentially they front end all of the McKesson DNS queries around the world.

It is a SaaS solution. So, we are using its latest version.

We were moving to this product from 2018 to '19. We were baselining before the pandemic. Nearly as soon as the pandemic started, the DNS queries almost doubled as people were trying to order more of anything related to medicine.

It has absolutely improved our DNS response time. Within our environment, we have customers who are worldwide. Our previous solution was located at a single location. Once we moved to this solution, our customers in Canada and the EU saw vast improvements. Our customers who were already in the United States may also have seen a more improved response time. It was not necessarily as noticeable, but it was probably still on the order of half the response time.

It has reduced DNS maintenance work in our organization, but it is hard to quantify. From an operational standpoint, the work has been reduced drastically. Before the solution, we'd have to send emails and go to portals, all of which takes a fair amount of time and interactions between people, whereas now, it's just an API call and the thing is gone or added. So, from a maintenance standpoint, mainly in terms of maintenance provisioning and deprovisioning, since we don't really see the internals of the SaaS solution, the reduction would be drastic. It would be a tenth of the time.

It has saved us time when it comes to manual processes. When it comes to provisioning, with the solution that we had before NS1, we had to tell clients that we had a one-week turnaround time, but now, we tell them that we can have it for them on the same day or even the same hour, which is pretty significant.

It has improved our end-user experience. A caveat is that with a lot of these things, if you're doing your job well, nobody notices you, and if you're doing them wrong, they're happy to tell you that everything is broken. I can say that so far, the end-user experience has been good. From a service standpoint, it has definitely improved uptime, and we haven't had to call them for any issues or anything to that effect. I haven't seen any problems.

We use it for all our external DNSs. We wanted to get away from maintaining our own servers and were looking for the ability to filter records to "steer" DNS requests.

The solution is hosted by NS1. All DNS records are there.

NS1 has reduced DNS maintenance work in our organization because we don't need to manage DNS servers. In addition to not maintaining our own servers, we don't have to update operating systems and handle patches. Those are big savings.

The solution also has a lot of security features to help protect us from DDoS attacks and the like. We don't need to manage that ourselves.

And the automatic steering of requests with the filtered records helps us to utilize our VPN boxes in a much better way. Now, people only need to use one name, whereas previously they had to use many different names to do this. That has helped us enormously.

Along those lines, the filtered records, with which you can build up rules to create load balancing, have improved things a lot, especially now with the pandemic that has resulted in a lot of people working from home. That has really helped the management of our VPN setup to be more flexible in a way that is easier to manage.

NS1 has also definitely improved our end-user experience. First of all, it has servers in different geographic locations. We didn't have that before, we only had them in Europe. And they use a technology called anycast so that a DNS request goes to the closest DNS server for that IP address. That speeds up the DNS resolution for people using the DNS from the internet. It improves performance a little bit for the end-user by minimizing the latency on the internet.

We use NS1 as an external DNS for our services. An external DNS is a simple name resolution for an IP address or other hosts. The cool thing about NS1 is that we can integrate our automation process. It automatically publishes new DNS records without having to look manually through a user interface as you would do with normal DNS providers.

It massively speeds things up. Today, we allow developers to deploy services and have externally facing DNS scrapers that are created automatically without the addition of human intervention.

The operational spectrum is somewhat simplified because there is less to manage. We don't have to manage internal and external DNSs, internally and externally. Instead, it is centralised by NS1 who takes care of upgrading and all the patching. 

They have always delivered within their SLA. It has been spot on. The service has been spotless. This is critical for us. If the DNS record didn't work, because it was under spec'd or capacity, then we would materially lose money as a company since our customers rely on our records to function and perform their financial activities.

We use NS1 as the primary point of contact, the first point of contact for a client to reach us, to discover a DNS. We use NS1 in two ways: We use the Managed DNS product and the Dedicated DNS product, which gives us redundancy. Our primary use-case is for getting users to the CDN [content delivery network] one that is best suited for each user.

We have an automated deployment, so we use Terraform to deploy changes.

The managed solution is completely managed by NS1; it's not on-premises.

The integrations for monitoring events is helpful. Monitoring of events can change things in the Filter Chain. That helps our team receive alerts. Our team is kept in the loop about what is happening.

When it comes to maintaining uptime during a major DDoS attack, NS1 is very good. NS1's Dedicated DNS gives us redundancy. In addition, NS1 has worked closely with us to get us into the position we are in today. They do a good job in communicating problems and of looking forward with their solutions. They don't just address the current issue when it comes to DDoS and mitigation. These are continuous issues. It's not just a one-off that you handle once. They look for solutions that will solve future DDoS impact.

It has also improved our DNS response times. Because we have been using NS1 for quite a long time, it's hard to estimate how much response times have improved. But since we started with them we have definitely done better. The most critical thing that we look at, rather than the response time, is the time for propagation, and that's been very good.

The solution has also massively reduced DNS maintenance work in our company. The way we were set up a long time ago was that we would maintain things by ourselves, and now we don't do anything along those lines. For the external DNS, we do about 10 percent of the amount of work that we did previously. That's a huge improvement. The amount of maintenance has gone down significantly and our maintenance cost is down by at least 70 percent, for the external DNS.

NS1's automation has also enabled us to assign people to other kinds of work. It saves us time so that we can concentrate on other things.

Overall, it has helped to improve our end-user experience. Knowing the DNS delivery part is taken care of is important; performance is very critical. Taking users to the right CDN or data center is very important for the end-user experience. NS1 is part of the set of tools we have to achieve that better user experience and to get them to the right place.