Azure DNS Private Zones

Azure DNS Private Zones is a service that allows you to create and manage custom DNS zones in the Azure cloud. These zones are private, meaning that they can only be accessed by resources within a specified virtual network. This makes it easy to set up DNS resolution for your internal resources without exposing them to the public internet.

Azure DNS Private Zones is built on top of the Azure DNS service, which is a globally available, highly scalable, and secure DNS hosting service. This means that you can benefit from the same reliability, performance, and security features that Azure DNS provides for public zones.

With Azure DNS Private Zones, you can create custom DNS zones with your own domain names, such as contoso.local, and manage them using Azure portal, Azure CLI, or Azure PowerShell. You can also associate these private zones with a virtual network, which allows you to resolve the DNS names of resources within the same virtual network without the need for public DNS resolution.

In addition, you can use Azure DNS Private Zones to resolve DNS names between virtual networks that are peered together or to resolve DNS names between virtual networks and on-premises networks that are connected using Azure ExpressRoute.

Azure DNS Private Zones supports a variety of record types, including A, AAAA, CNAME, MX, NS, PTR, SOA, SRV, and TXT records. You can also configure zone-level settings, such as custom DNS servers and TTL values, to fine-tune the behavior of your private zones.

Azure DNS Private Zones provides a secure and scalable solution for managing DNS resolution within your Azure virtual network. Whether you need to resolve internal domain names or enable communication between virtual networks, Azure DNS Private Zones can help you achieve your goals with ease.

Azure DNS Private Zones Usage Examples

Azure DNS Private Zones is a service offered by Microsoft Azure that allows you to create and manage custom DNS zones within your virtual network, providing private name resolution between your resources in the cloud. Here are some examples of how Azure DNS Private Zones can be used:

  1. Name resolution for virtual machines

If you have a virtual network in Azure that hosts several virtual machines, you can use Azure DNS Private Zones to create a custom DNS zone for your internal domain name, such as mycompany.local. Once the private zone is created, you can add A records to map the IP addresses of your virtual machines to their hostnames. For example, you could add an A record that maps the IP address of a virtual machine named “webserver” to the hostname “webserver.mycompany.local”. This allows other resources in the virtual network to access the webserver using its hostname instead of its IP address.

  1. Name resolution for Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) clusters

If you have an AKS cluster in Azure that runs several containers, you can use Azure DNS Private Zones to create a custom DNS zone for your internal domain name, such as mycluster.local. Once the private zone is created, you can add A records to map the IP addresses of your Kubernetes nodes to their hostnames. For example, you could add an A record that maps the IP address of a Kubernetes node named “node-1” to the hostname “node-1.mycluster.local”. This allows other resources in the virtual network to access the containers running on the AKS cluster using their hostnames.

  1. Name resolution for Azure virtual network peering

If you have multiple virtual networks in Azure that are peered together, you can use Azure DNS Private Zones to create a custom DNS zone for your internal domain name, such as mycompany.local. Once the private zone is created, you can configure it to be linked with the virtual network peering. This allows you to resolve the names of resources in the remote virtual network, which can help in scenarios where you have distributed applications or services that need to communicate across virtual networks.

  1. Name resolution for Azure ExpressRoute

If you have an on-premises network that is connected to Azure using Azure ExpressRoute, you can use Azure DNS Private Zones to create a custom DNS zone for your internal domain name, such as mycompany.local. Once the private zone is created, you can configure it to be linked with the ExpressRoute circuit. This allows you to resolve the names of resources in your on-premises network, which can help in scenarios where you have hybrid cloud applications or services that need to communicate between on-premises and cloud environments.

Azure DNS Private Zones provides a secure and scalable solution for managing DNS resolution within your Azure virtual network. It can be used to provide private name resolution for virtual machines, AKS clusters, virtual network peering, and ExpressRoute connections, and can help simplify the management of your hybrid cloud environment.

Author: tonyhughes