ATTO FastFrame NS12 - network adapter - PCIe 2.0 x8 - 10GBase-SR x 2
Mfg # FFRM-NS12-000
CDW # 2432517
Know your gear
The FastFrame NS12 dual port 10GbE Network Adapter leverages the industry standard Ethernet technology from Intel, to meet the bandwidth-intensive demands of high-performance, high-bandwidth I/O environments. The NS12 provides industry-leading throughput and latency management with minimal CPU utilization and power consumption.
The FastFrame NS12 is the premier connectivity choice for applications such as data backup and restoration, clustered computing, medical imaging, IP content delivery, and video rendering. With support for data center bridging and native OS iSCSI initiators, ATTO's FastFrame network adapters provide unmatched features for networking environments.
The FastFrame NS12 is the premier connectivity choice for applications such as data backup and restoration, clustered computing, medical imaging, IP content delivery, and video rendering. With support for data center bridging and native OS iSCSI initiators, ATTO's FastFrame network adapters provide unmatched features for networking environments.
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ATTO FastFrame NS12 - network adapter - PCIe 2.0 x8 - 10GBase-SR x 2 is rated
5.00 out of
5 by
9.
Rated 5 out of
5 by
Max Mongardini from
Its ability to automate DNS creation is paramount
What is our primary use case?
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.
How has it helped my organization?
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.
What is most valuable?
The ability to automate DNS creation is definitely paramount.
The solution is an API-first platform for DNS and application traffic management. This is exactly what we needed it for since most DNS services don't come with an API. Whereas, being API-driven, NS1 allows us to create automation against it. We can create pipelines, deploy software, and automatically integrate with NS1 in an automated fashion, which is definitely great.
NS1 Managed DNS has helped improve our end user experience, which has sped up our time to market.
What needs improvement?
We are an external DNS and still maintain an internal DNS. I would like it to have the external DNS separate from the internal DNS. This would give us a sense of security. For example, if there is a problem with the internal DNS, it would not affect the external DNS.
For how long have I used the solution?
The solution was in place before I joined two years ago. The head of platforms is a friend of mine, so we discussed this solution. It was implemented a full year before my time.
The company has been using it for three years.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
The solution's stability is absolutely perfect.
We haven't experienced any downtime whatsoever in the past three years. I am very confident and happy with the service.
We have a platform engineer who maintains it on the client side. From a maintenance point of view, it probably takes a week of engineering's time a year.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
It scales perfectly. It is all very transparent.
It is utilised on a weekly basis. Anytime there is a new deployment that requires an external DNS, that goes through NS1. So, records get updated automatically.
Scalability is something that you can't underestimate with DNS.
We are halfway through the capacity of the service. We are planning to double our userbase by the end of the year, but that won't necessarily correspond to twice the number of requests. Therefore, I would expect an increase of DNS requests to be a third more than they are today.
How are customer service and support?
Our account manager with NS1 has been very good. They are always available.
It has been quite hands-off. In the past two years, we have probably contacted the technical support once. They were spot on. I would give them an eight out of 10, which is conservative, given that I haven't had enough support tickets to really rate them.
How would you rate customer service and support?
Positive
How was the initial setup?
Start with a code-first approach. Try to use the APIs as much as possible from the beginning, instead of being tempted to go through a user interface. Once it is done manually, it stays manual.
We use our client in our infrastructure to communicate with NS1. This client is a bit complex in the way that it is set up. NS1 has their own client solution that you can deploy into your platform to do this, but even that is a bit complex. So, I would like a very simple, thin, light API agent that we can deploy into our platform to communicate with NS1. That would be welcome.
What about the implementation team?
We added another external DNS together with NS1.
What was our ROI?
On the automation side of things, if we had to manually create all the external entries, it would require a lot of effort, waiting time, and tickets being generated for blockages. 5% to 10% of our automation spectrum is handled by DNS records being generated automatically. Overall, as a company, we do approximately 10 releases a day. Of those 10 releases, if one or two need an external DNS record to be changed or created, then they would get stuck in a queue waiting for a person to create the record manually. So, the solution definitely speeds up our Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC).
Assuming 20 releases a month need manual intervention. If there are 240 releases that need an engineer spending about an hour on them, then I would say that the solution saves us 240 hours.
What other advice do I have?
Look carefully at DNS security. In the last few years, there have been several DNS attacks that leveraged DNS protocols. Therefore, it is important that companies actually know what they are doing with DNS.
I would rate NS1 Managed DNS as nine out of 10. There is room for improvement.
Disclaimer: PeerSpot contacted the reviewer to collect the review and to validate authenticity. The reviewer was referred by the vendor, but the review is not subject to editing or approval by the vendor.
Date published: 2022-02-22T00:00:00-05:00
Rated 5 out of
5 by
Adam Surak from
Handles customer-facing records and upstream selection logic with good efficiency
What is our primary use case?
We use Managed DNS to steer traffic for our API. It handles customer-facing records and the upstream selection logic.
How has it helped my organization?
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.
What is most valuable?
We leverage two things from Managed DNS that we couldn't do with any other solution. One is their filter chain technology, which allows us to shift some of the intelligence we need for the traffic steering to the DNS. The second one is data sources, which enables us to manipulate multiple records simultaneously using NS1's internal message DOS. In our case, we are trying to direct the traffic in over 150,000 different NS1 records to an arbitrary set of repeating responses.
If we have about 1,000 endpoints, that translates to around 150,000 records. Assuming there's an even distribution, so every time a server fails or an endpoint goes on a level, we would have 150 updates. With NS1, we have one, so this had an even more significant effect. There are situations where we have thousands of specific records sharing the same responses. In that case, there is one update instead of thousands and thousands.
When we chose Managed DNS in 2014, it was the only solution that could do what we wanted, but I'm not sure about the current state of the market. The NS1 API is an API on top of a managed DNS. It's not an afterthought. It's not like the solution existed.
Someone was sending updates by email. Then a product manager came along and said, "Hey, there is this cool thing. It's called an API. Maybe we should do it?" And they are like, "Okay. Let's do it." In the case of NS1, they thought about how to use an API to manipulate and retrieve the stuff. It's supposed to be API-driven. Also, NS1 doesn't have hidden features that would not be available over the API. Even their dashboard is built on top of the API. You can leverage all the functionality programmatically. That's what we do.
We don't use their native integrations because we have been customers before these integrations and real-time telemetry existed. Our solution isn't leveraging either of those. Instead, we leveraged their API integration, which was the first thing that existed. Indeed, the API is at the core of how we use Managed DNS. No one goes to the dashboard or manually clicks anything. Everything goes via the API, and we perform hundreds of changes every minute. The API automatically drives everything, so that's the integration we leverage.
We don't use the Pulsar Active Steering feature because we don't have a website. Our solution is being used as an API for other solutions. You can put the Pulsar agent on the website and feed NS1 the information. In our case, we are integrating into third-party sites. We cannot put our JavaScript on their websites for NS1 to provide the data, so we don't.
For how long have I used the solution?
We've been using NS1 Managed DNS since late 2013, so it's been more than eight years.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
NS1 has built advanced solutions for how to stay up during DDoS attacks. I can't recall a situation where NS1 has been unavailable in the last 24 months, and we have very precise monitoring of NS1 availability. Any downtime that might occur would be highly localized and quickly mitigated.
How are customer service and support?
We launched on Thanksgiving and didn't realize it because we were all sitting in Europe. We had to wake up the founders of NS1 with an issue on Thanksgiving Day. They remember it to this day, and every single time it comes up, they always mention that I'm the one who woke them up on Thanksgiving. It was terrible, so I would say you need to plan deployment and keep the NS1 team in the loop because they can help. Their support is excellent. They can help you roll it out. Just don't go crazy and work with them.
NS1 had only four to six people in their company at the time. Today we have 650 employees, but at the time, we had only eight, so NS1 was roughly the same size as us, and we were willing to pay them a lot of money.
When we first deployed, we flipped the switch, and it didn't work as well as we expected. It wasn't a complete outage, but we had issues in some places with some customers. The NS1 team went out of their way to resolve it on Thanksgiving. We have a post about it on our blog. We called it "Black Thursday."
If you go on our blog and search for "Black Thursday," you can find a post from November 28th, 2014, describing in detail how we shot ourselves in the foot during the transition and how we managed everything. We didn't mention NS1 in the process because we didn't want to. It was completely our fault.
We migrated, and it was terrible, but they went above and beyond. They even called operators worldwide to tell them to flush their DNS caches because we messed up. It was a great experience but also a massive incident for us. NS1 assigned us a customer success manager and an account manager, and I'm part of the customer advisory board because we are long-term customers.
Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?
NS1 was the first solution that could express the logic we needed to be hidden behind the records, and we couldn't adapt any other solution to our needs. We tried Dyn and other solutions. Our main requirement was geo-steering, and we wanted to cover every record. We tried to assign the location of that endpoint. Depending on the location of the end-user, we wanted the end-user to be steered to the closest available endpoint. Currently, availability is precisely the issue with the data sources. You have to replicate it repeatedly thousands of times. NS1 simplifies the process.
The other reason we went with NS1 was the sheer expression power of the geo-steering. We struggled with Dyn for weeks, trying to configure their global geolocator to do what we needed. The precision was limited to the continent and a country, but we needed more. NS1 let us geo-coordinate, and NS1 was like, "Okay. We're going to steer it the same."
The expression capabilities of NS1 and the possibilities of the filter chain were the decisive factors. That's what we wanted to build and what we needed from a DNS. NS1 had it built-in.
We also previously used Route 53 from AWS. I'm not sure if it improved response times because you can't do much about that. NS1 or AWS manages it, so there is only so much you can complain about availability. It also depends on the level of telemetry that you have. Overall, I would say we saved money by migrating because we could not do what we wanted to do on AWS. On Route 53, we were unable to do it efficiently. We switched to NS1, and they probably saved us between $10 million and $50 million that we would have had to spend building it ourselves.
How was the initial setup?
Setting up Managed DNS was straightforward. When we were migrating, we dumped everything from Route 53 and wrote a small script to import everything into NS1. Then we flipped the main DNS server records. That was our implementation strategy.
The only preparation needed was to create a bunch of testing records, and we tested it from probes around the world to see how it behaves and performs. Once NS1 was chosen as our go-to solution, it was as simple as that. We eventually exported and pulled the API off Route 53 then pushed it directly to NS1.
Overall, the migration was seamless, but we had an incident in 2014 that we caused ourselves when migrating to NS1. It was our fault, and no one saw it coming. We kind of forget that IPv6 exists, so we created the problem ourselves.
We don't have DNS maintenance work. That's a term that no one in the organization knows, no one understands. If you asked someone in our company, "How much time do you spend on DNS maintenance?" People would say, "What are you talking about? What do you mean by DNS maintenance?" None of my engineers would be able to wrap their heads around it. We don't maintain anything in NS1 aside from the mess we cause with our records and our automation. Otherwise, we don't spend any time maintaining the platform.
What was our ROI?
If NS1 didn't provide this solution, we would've had to make our own. Once we discovered Managed DNS, we decided there was no way we were building it ourselves. It is now a core service for our product. Without them, I probably would have a massive team today and sink tens of millions of dollars into our custom DNS infrastructure. What's more, we wouldn't be able to do probably 10 percent of what they're doing.
It's fully automated, so it has cut down on manual processes associated with managing DNS by 100 percent. We don't have any manual processes, but otherwise, we would need staff to do something. All the manual processes...
Disclaimer: PeerSpot contacted the reviewer to collect the review and to validate authenticity. The reviewer was referred by the vendor, but the review is not subject to editing or approval by the vendor.
Date published: 2022-02-22T00:00:00-05:00
Rated 5 out of
5 by
Valentino Volonghi from
Terraform integration means all entries are created and Configuration done at deploy time, reducing manual work
What is our primary use case?
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.
How has it helped my organization?
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.
What is most valuable?
For starters, it integrates with Terraform and a lot of our infrastructure is effectively built out using Terraform. That makes all this stuff extremely easy. With Dyn we had to have a separate process to update DNS entries, and only a person like me could do it. Even then, it was going to be a very delicate process. Now, we have it integrated with Terraform and when we deploy, all the entries are created and configuration is done.
As an API-first platform for DNS it is great. The one thing it needs to do for us is be integrated with our infrastructure-as-a-service setup, Terraform. In that regard it beats all of its competitors, including Dyn from Oracle and Route 53 from Amazon. Neither of them support integration with Terraform. Their support team is also great around this stuff.
Secondly, the user interface is pretty fast and it's very easy to get reporting on queries-per-second underneath each record. That means that if we misconfigure something we can very quickly see the results in the metrics. That wasn't the case with Dyn. Being able to see the metrics helps. It helps that the interface is really quick, and relatively easy to use, especially compared to other solutions that we've seen, including Route 53, which we also use.
Technically speaking, there is no one button to enable load balancing like the others, but you can customize the way load balancing works more, to your own specific needs. We took advantage of that for the particular way we want to run our infrastructure. It's a little bit harder to set up compared to what Dyn was, but it's certainly more flexible. That needed to be learned and we played around with it for a little while at the beginning, before doing the migration. But since the migration, everything has been going well.
Another thing that is pretty helpful is that every one of these entries has its own target probe, called "monitors" in NS1 parlance. Each one of these endpoints has a set of monitors and it's possible to choose the regions from which you check the times of an area and the policies. This wasn't possible with Dyn, unless you talked with the account manager, and it would still always be a little off. There were occasions in which Dyn decided that a server in Tokyo was down because it wasn't reachable from San Francisco, and no one cared. Considering that we have a data center in San Francisco, San Francisco traffic shouldn't determine what happens to the Tokyo data center. Using Dyn made things like that a pain to deal with, but with NS1 we have been able to select the specific region from which we are monitoring our endpoints to determine if they are up or down and if they need to be pulled out of rotation. And they have mostly been working fine.
There is also a Slack integration that we set up for our monitors. Whenever a monitor goes down, or there's a down and up, we get a notification in Slack. That means that the routing of requests to our team, for escalating any problem with the DNS, can be done more democratically than we used to be able to do with Dyn. With that solution, it would be sent to the email associated with the account.
In addition, there are the more intangible things, such as being on an exclusive, dedicated DNS network. I gather NS1 has both dedicated and shared DNS infrastructure, and I think we are on the dedicated. I've never tried the other one, and I don't know how Dyn was set up, but we've never had issues since switching. Everything has worked pretty well.
What needs improvement?
We use the geo load balancing functionality and there are a couple of things that are helpful there. But the language itself is something we had to get used to a little bit. Some of my folks made a few mistakes in rolling out the Filter Chain. It doesn't return all of the multiple results by default. It returns only one. So we have to add a bunch of operations, like geo-target by first selecting a group in terms of regional proximity and then shuffle the list of potential endpoints and then select the first one. The Filter Chain setup is a bit hard to grasp at first. It would also be nice to have a way to simulate changes in addition to staging.
Also, right now, as far as I understand, there is no way to do atomic changes to a DNS configuration. You need to make changes record by record and apply. But if someone wants to do more complex stuff like, for example, if I want to migrate from a CNAME to an A record being served, or vice versa, that's typically something that involves first taking out all of the CNAMEs and then adding all of the A records. That would require some downtime. It would be a lot easier if I could just have the new full record with the CNAME or A record, and then be able to replace the nodes directly in a single operation and I don't think they have that.
For how long have I used the solution?
We started using NS1 Managed DNS in 2018 or 2019.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
Except for that one time that they had probe monitor issues, we've never had a single problem with it. It's pretty stable.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
We haven't had any issues with the scalability. The scalability helps meet SLAs and customers’ demands without adding complexity. We run more than 4.5 billion queries per month on our DNS, so it's pretty critical that they can handle that volume and it's been going pretty well so far.
How are customer service and support?
We used their tech support at the start a couple of times. We were trying to get onboarded and some of us were getting confused with the setup for load balancing DNS. The first or second time that we dealt with them they decided to just write out for us the way that the Filter Chain was supposed to be.
Another couple of times, they wrote to us first about issues.
There had been some kind of ongoing event and we wrote to them. They responded very quickly that there was an issue and that some of their probes were down. That told us not to go hunting for anything. Rather, I was able to go in the UI a...
Disclaimer: PeerSpot contacted the reviewer to collect the review and to validate authenticity. The reviewer was referred by the vendor, but the review is not subject to editing or approval by the vendor.
Date published: 2022-02-17T00:00:00-05:00
Rated 5 out of
5 by
reviewer1660884 from
Has good traffic management, speed of updates, and observability
What is our primary use case?
NS1 holds all of our domains.
When we started using it, we didn't use it with API automation. Today, we do everything with automation and run everything with our automation, so that any change we run, all the data is backed up with GIT. Changes are done with an API so that there is no manual work. It reduces errors significantly and allows us to quickly roll back all the activities on the platform. It works flawlessly for us. Deployments are very fast. There's absolutely no complaint there.
We manage our internet facing traffic with it.
How has it helped my organization?
We use it for traffic optimization. I have optimized the traffic using this feature by 20%.
DNS obviously plays a major role in DDoS attacks. It's something that is under attack, but it's also a major player in its ability to defend. NS1 has been doing an amazing job with that.
It has improved our DNS response times as well.
We've been using Managed DNS for the past 10 years. We moved from a different vendor a few years ago. Generally speaking, I would say that Managed DNS reduces the overhead.
NS1's automation has enabled us to assign tasks to other work because we have very little DNS right now because it's all managed. It frees up SRE time to deal with actual internal system and application management, instead of managing the infrastructure that can be managed by a third party.
It helped to improve our end-user experience because users get better service by accelerating the response time.
We have also seen benefits when it comes to speed, time, and cost.
What is most valuable?
The ability to manage traffic, what's called Smart Domains or Smart Record, enables us to provide our customers the relevant, closest data center by providing the correct IP address according to geography or other logic. The ability to see real-time performance is also very useful.
Everything we download into our observability platform so that we can also track any changes in traffic behavior or things like that is also something that we use quite a lot. I'd say traffic management, the speed of updates, and observability are the top three things that we use.
Observability means monitoring the API, the ability to see the traffic at the different levels, the ability to connect the right record to the right place, and then see everything within the platform or within our observability platform. It is really useful. The automation and the fact that they provide the connectivity into Terraform, for example, is very useful because it allows for ease of integration. I don't have to write the right API integrations myself. We can actually use industry standards that are available out there.
What needs improvement?
There could maybe be additional ways to manage traffic. There are no major improvements we're looking for. It's a very complete solution.
For how long have I used the solution?
I have been using NS1 Managed DNS for over four years.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
The platform itself is stable and highly available. We had very few incidents and never full downtime.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
We have not found any scalability issues. We are running a pretty large operation ourselves, of around 100,000 requests per second, and we have never had any scalability issues with the platform. It's always scaled to the size that we need.
It provides scalability to help meet SOA and customers' demands without adding complexity. DNS is a basic part of any solution. And once you have 100,000 requests coming in and you need to make sure that the connectivity is there, the response time is there, the error levels are as low as possible, and every request actually gets an answer. If a third party can do this and I can take care of my actual application and not think about the path into my application, that is very useful.
How are customer service and technical support?
The only time we used support was when we migrated the additional features around security. They were highly professional and available. They are very good at what they do.
Post-deployment their support was very good. I would rate them a ten out of ten. They are very knowledgeable, not only about their product but about general DNS protocols, from performance to global interconnectivity. They were able to look at the whole picture and the small details within the picture as well.
Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?
We switched from Akamai. It was slower and had fewer features.
How was the initial setup?
The initial setup was very straightforward. Using the migration itself was easy. The ongoing monitoring and change for the service, the support that we got from NS1, was all very clear. They are all very professional. There was no downtime. It's very, very straightforward. It took a few weeks. It was very short.
We kept a backup of the old service up and running, and moved 50% of the traffic into the new DNS and then into the new managed service. Then once we saw everything was running smoothly, we deployed the rest.
We were working with NS1's customer success team during our deployment. I was satisfied with their support.
What was our ROI?
We have seen better performance. It's very hard to measure if there is an ROI here, but we have absolutely seen better performance, and that is the important part for us.
Which other solutions did I evaluate?
We also looked at Neustar. NS1 solution has many more features and it works faster than any of the other solutions. It was also that the pricing was clearer and much easier to work with in terms of the tiers of the pricing. It was really the full package.
What other advice do I have?
For those who have a free cloud provider or basic DNS, I would say that the road into the application and the road into your infrastructure is part of the actual solution that you provide. DNS is part of that pavement. That is the road that end-users reach your application. The higher quality you can have there, especially if it's at a reasonable price means that you will be able to better serve your customers. And that is an important part of IT. Eventually, we are here to serve the business and if we can serve them better then it has an impact.
Once you have it side-by-side to your existing solution and the stability, speed, reduced error level, the easy connectivity into other platforms, observability, and automation are all worth the investment in engineering time and cost.
I would rate NS1 Managed DNS a ten out of ten.
Which deployment model are you using for this solution?
Public Cloud
Disclaimer: IT Central Station contacted the reviewer to collect the review and to validate authenticity. The reviewer was referred by the vendor, but the review is not subject to editing or approval by the vendor.
Date published: 2021-09-19T00:00:00-04:00
Rated 5 out of
5 by
Reviewer87408 from
Improves Our Latency By More Than 10% for Selected Regions And Helps Us To Meet Our SLA Of 99.99% Uptime
What is our primary use case?
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.
How has it helped my organization?
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.
What is most valuable?
The Pulsar functionality, map uploading, and real user maps around DNS are some of the valuable things for us.
Another valuable feature is how easily we can interact with their API. We run our infrastructure as a code, so it is really easy for us to describe the whole configuration of the NS1 service by using our service configuration and interact with their API. We like this functionality a lot.
Monitoring is really important for us. We really care about reliability, and we want to make sure that we can remove some points of presence in our sector and in our edge network really fast when we experience any problems. So, monitoring that NS1 provides for DNS is really important for us.
What needs improvement?
We care about monitoring and telemetry work, and NS1 provides a pretty good system for monitoring. We can monitor our endpoints and points of presence around the world. If there are any issues, we can easily remove them from our network, but this area needs some improvement because it is not always reliable in NS1. In the past, we had a number of false-positive cases when the monitoring system told us about some problems in our infrastructure that were not true. NS1 is improving the system, and we are constantly talking about this with them. I know that they are releasing a new version of their monitoring system, which is really important for us, but this is a different area where we would expect them to improve.
For how long have I used the solution?
I joined the company two years ago, so this is when I started working with the product, but in our company, we have been using it for a longer period of time. We started using it several years ago.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
Managed DNS is very stable for us. In our company, our uptime SLA is 99.99%, and DNS is crucial here. If the DNS system is down, then there will be a significant availability hit for the whole organization. We have been using NS1 for a long period of time, and we have not had any major outages on the NS1 side that lead to any outage on our side.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
We don't have any problems with scalability. Our edge network is growing. So, every year, we add more and more points of presence to our edge network. It means that we need to add more zones for us. So far, we didn't experience any problems with this. It is easy to scale the solution.
We never had any complexity with meeting SLAs and customer demands. We heavily utilize NS1 API, and we have automation on our site around this API. It has worked well so far, and there are no problems with it. Its non-complexity is super important because we want to have everything as smooth as possible and as automated as possible. It helps us to actually achieve these goals.
We have a whole traffic team in our organization that has seven people at the moment. So, we use NS1 within one single team in our company.
It is being used across our whole infrastructure. This is our main DNS provider, and an increase in usage would align with the organic growth of our user base. We don't have plans for any additional increase at this time.
How are customer service and support?
We work with their customer success team. We have a dedicated person from their side with whom we can talk about our problems, our issues, or any proposals we might have. This is a really fruitful collaboration.
We are happy with the NS1 support. They are responsive and professional. They reply to all of our requests. They provide good updates about progress or status on their side, and we can even discuss the next steps. If there are some things that need to be improved, they always propose a good plan for improvement. I'm completely satisfied with their customer service team. I would rate them a 10 out of 10.
How was the initial setup?
It was set up before I joined this organization. Its maintenance is done on their side. Because it is a software as a service, all upgrades and maintenance for NS1 services are done by NS1.
What was our ROI?
We have definitely got a return on investment because this is the core functionality for our company to operate our business, but I don't have any numbers.
What other advice do I have?
To someone who says that they don't spend money on a solution like this because they have a free cloud provider or a basic DNS, I would say that they need to think about reliability and, of course, performance. Those are two main things on the users' side. On the company side or the engineering side, with NS1, it is really easy to have automation in place for management and monitoring.
My only advice is to keep it automated. It is easy to do. NS1 provides the whole platform to run their solution from your infrastructure as a code by using API. You can also use tools like Terraform or any other automated management system.
I would rate Managed DNS a 10 out of 10. We don't have a lot of issues. Of course, it is a growing product, and there are some areas of improvement for NS1, but just based on our interactions with them and how this product works for our infrastructure, we are completely satisfied.
Which deployment model are you usin...
Disclaimer: IT Central Station contacted the reviewer to collect the review and to validate authenticity. The reviewer was referred by the vendor, but the review is not subject to editing or approval by the vendor.
Date published: 2021-10-17T00:00:00-04:00
Rated 5 out of
5 by
reviewer1689438 from
Filter Chain allows us to implement reliable DNS load balancing in a straightforward manner
What is our primary use case?
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.
How has it helped my organization?
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.
What is most valuable?
* Ease of use
* Stability - We haven't had any issues at all with the service.
Also, the fact that it's an API-first platform for DNS and application traffic management is one of the reasons we looked into NS1. We use it for a lot of automation and metrics gathering and it's been great.
Its real-time telemetry and ecosystem of integrations are very easy to use. We haven't taken advantage of much of that, but the fact that we know those capabilities are there, and that they're pretty straightforward, is key. We have done a few things using their routing protocols that are provided as part of the service and that has been really nice. We can actually do automation around that as needed.
What needs improvement?
I would like to see the UI updated to allow me to do finer searches. I would also like to have the ability to get reports that can sort based on various metrics. For example, I would like to be able to say, "Show me the top 10 records by total queries" in an easy-to-digest format. If I wanted to do that today, given that we have 500 domains, I'd have to go into every single domain and browse through it to see what is getting hit the most. That kind of filtering functionality would help because our licensing model is based on the number of queries we serve per month. If something goes hog-wild, I want to be able to easily find what that is and then react to it.
For how long have I used the solution?
We have been using NS1 Managed DNS for about four years.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
If there are scalability issues, they haven't been apparent to us as a customer. As a system engineer, I can empathize and I'm sure they have some internally, but we haven't seen them. The scalability helps meet SLAs and customers’ demands, without adding complexity.
Every customer who hits our website is using NS1, so that is up to millions per day. Internally, it's mostly system engineers who use it to add or remove records and there are about a dozen of them, possibly more.
In terms of increasing use of NS1, we're looking into their internal DNS and DHCP solutions. That would be a complicated migration for us, and we are currently in multi-year agreements with other vendors. The goal would be to start slowly migrating over to NS1 for all of our DNS and DHCP needs, but that will take a few years.
How are customer service and support?
We have a dedicated success manager. We don't need a lot from him, but every two or three months he checks in to see if we have any large needs. We also meet with him once every few months just to touch base.
Their technical support is really quick to respond to concerns. They communicate well and provide feedback that's not only technical but easy to understand if you're not technical. They do a great job.
How would you rate customer service and support?
Positive
Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?
We've used other tools like this over the years, obviously, being a publicly exposed e-commerce platform, and we've had some struggles with them. NS1 has been really smooth for us. Most recently we used Dyn DNS. They were purchased by Oracle and, predictably, their offering went downhill after that. Dyn was cumbersome, at best, to get the stats and reports that we needed, and to steer traffic as needed. With NS1, it has been extremely straightforward.
The clincher that made us switch to NS1, for me, was actually talking to their CEO at a conference in New York, in 2017. He gave a presentation on their ability to withstand large attacks. He is a systems engineer/architect/programmer at heart. He knew the tech side of the industry and that gave me the confidence I needed that he actually knew how to solve some of the problems that we were facing.
We then went through some stress tests with NS1 and it was much more performant than other vendors that we had done trials with.
How was the initial setup?
The initial setup was straightforward. There wasn't a whole lot to it. I had to learn the semantics that are specific to the system, but once I did that it was really straightforward.
The deployment took a few phone calls and meetings with our onboarding team and engineers, to go over the scope. The work itself was really pretty straightforward and took just a couple days.
Our implementation strategy was to sync the main zones we care about, like our main ".com" domain, which is a big zone where a lot of our traffic comes. We added the NS1 name servers to that zone, in addition to the Dyn name servers. That meant a customer going to our website would get served through Dyn or NS1 or sometimes they'd bounce around. Once we saw that NS1 was receiving traffic, we let it bake for a couple of days and then we started removing the Dyn name servers, to the point where there was only NS1 left. There was no downtime when we migrated to NS1 from Dyn.
The solution's automation has saved our staff work. As I mentioned, we host about 500 domains and serve DNS publicly through NS1. We were doing a lot of that in-house on our own infrastructure and appliances, through Infoblox. The thought of migrating all of that to another platform was kind of harrowing. But with the NS1 API, it actually took us maybe four hours to do all the work. That kind of stuff is really helpful when you're an assistant engineer and you have multitasking upon multitasking happening. I was thinking that project would take two months, but it took one day to do.
What about the implementation team?
We did not use a third-party.
What was our ROI?
Our ROI comes from the fact that it has been stable and we've had to spend less time on it than we did with third-party integrations and other solutions that we've purchased. It's more of a set-it-and-forget-it type of platform, which is extremely valuable.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
NS1's pricing is much more aggressive than its competitors in the market and you get more value out of what you pay for it.
Which other solutions did I evaluate?
We went through trials with Dyn, of course, because we were their customer. We had also done some trials with Infoblox, which is another of our vendors, but that was where we were hosting the DNS ourselves and using their appliances. And we did some trials with Akamai, which is our CDN provider—the biggest one on the internet—and they have their own D...
Disclaimer: IT Central Station contacted the reviewer to collect the review and to validate authenticity. The reviewer was referred by the vendor, but the review is not subject to editing or approval by the vendor.
Date published: 2021-10-14T00:00:00-04:00
Rated 5 out of
5 by
James Marcus from
Centralized DNS management, good traffic routing capabilities, and significantly improves DNS response times
What is our primary use case?
The product is a DNS as a service and we have automated the creation and deletion of all sorts of DNS records.
How has it helped my organization?
We needed to have the fastest and most secure and resilient DNS possible, and that's what we got. We don't worry about denial of service attacks on the DNS, as we've seen other large vendors go through. We have access to a significant and forward-thinking feature set that allows us to use things like DNSSEC fairly easily.
Our DNS response times have improved significantly. I have not compared data within the past year but at the time, we looked at a 99.9% evaluation and saw that NS1 was the most effective and fastest solution.
We have access to enterprise tooling that allows us to have a single pane of glass between our internal DNS solutions and our external ones. We also have the ability to use advanced routing techniques with the rules engine or the additional tooling that NS1 provides.
The application traffic management capabilities using the API are excellent. We orchestrate that API using Terraform, which means that there are no manual steps involved in bringing up a piece of infrastructure that needs a DNS record or maintaining hygiene in our DNS records because services are taken down. All of it is orchestrated with the use of the API with Terraform on top to achieve it. Overall, it's a very robust API and it meets our needs.
While it doesn't apply to the entire company, this product allows us to utilize automation through the API, which saves us a significant amount of time and eliminates manual changes that are error-prone.
We have been unaffected by major DDoS attacks because of the architecture.
This product has allowed us to reduce or eliminate DNS maintenance work. I can't estimate how much time this has saved us but being able to use an API versus manual maintenance means that we don't really have to do any maintenance. We've been given a solution that allows us to automate everything that we need to do.
The automation provided by NS1 means that we no longer have to focus on that work, which allows us to assign staff to other tasks. Time is saved because we don't really use manual processes with the DNS. We try to automate everything we do in the DevOps team, so this has been effective for us.
What is most valuable?
The most valuable features are the DNSSEC and the general reliability and speed of the service. We find that the low latency access to DNS queries has a direct effect on the customer experience. Visiting a site, whether it's an AdTech-based solution or marketing tech, the fact that whatever we're rendering on a page can be rendered better than the industry standard, in terms of time, ensures a better user experience.
The Application Telemetry feature is awesome. This includes latency detection and it allows us to detect where a customer may run into latency on the internet, giving us the opportunity to route around it. It contributes to providing the best user experience for our clients.
Using the Pulsar feature has certainly improved our user experience. Using Pulsar with telemetry monitoring between the customer and the endpoint, we are able to detect traffic and route it appropriately, which ensures the uptime of our applications and web properties. It also ensures that the lowest latency experience is possible.
What needs improvement?
We would really like them to become a DNS registrar.
For how long have I used the solution?
I have been using NS1 Managed DNS for approximately seven years, since 2014, across companies.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
I don't have any issues with stability.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
Scalability-wise, I haven't had any issues with this product. It is being used wherever we're using DNS and as our business grows, it will be utilized more.
We have a DevOps team and an infrastructure team that uses NS1. The DevOps team mainly manages the automation of the cloud infrastructure and tools, whereas the infrastructure team manages our legacy on-premises data center.
This product provides the scalability we need to help meet SLAs and customers' demands without adding complexity, which is very important to us. Although it doesn't happen as often anymore, there can be significant changes in the demand for our service. This has the potential to overwhelm services, just like we see in denial of service attacks. However, the available capacity in NS1 has meant that we've never had a challenge with that.
How are customer service and technical support?
I have worked with the customer success team and the experience was world-class. They're a customer-first team and they are always available. We reach out to them on Slack and they're always there for us. They're straightforward and transparent about any possible issues that they have on their side and overall, it's a wonderful experience.
The same is true for the product's technical support. They're always there for us and transparent about any challenges.
Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?
In the past, the company used Dyn, which is now by Oracle. I have also used UltraDNS.
There were several reasons that we switched. The number one reason is support and service, the second is the forward-thinking functionality and features, and the third reason is the cost.
How was the initial setup?
At this company, the initial setup was very straightforward.
It was an import, and it was completed in a matter of hours or less.
Our implementation strategy was to import or migrate the zones from a previous NS1 account that was owned by another company, and then make the necessary registrar changes. During our migration, there was zero downtime.
What about the implementation team?
I implemented NS1 Managed DNS at my current company. We completed the deployment in-house.
What was our ROI?
ROI is hard to quantify but in terms of application uptime and customer experience, we have seen a return on our investment.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
The cost of this product is one of the reasons that we chose it.
There may be overage costs in addition to the standard licensing fees, although I haven't experienced them.
Which other solutions did I evaluate?
I looked at the Dyn and UltraDNS solutions. I also looked at Akamai Fast DNS and some of the cloud services. The two main reasons that we chose NS1 are the low-latency DNS, and a feature set that was unique and seemed to be beyond what anyone else was doing.
What other advice do I have?
My advice for anyone who thinks that they don't need a solution like this because they have a free or basic DNS with their cloud provider is that they need to evaluate how DNS solutions may affect the customer experience. They should consider the global footprint of NS1, the network architecture, and where they implement Anycast. If these things don't matter then they're probably not running a business that relies on website revenue or has a website that represents their business.
The biggest lesson that I have learned from using this product is how easy it was to implement it, and that doing so probably reduces the risk of migrating to a new DNS solution.
This is a product that I have recommended to many different people. In general, I would say that this has been the easiest solution to manage and implement.
I would rate this solution a ten out of ten.
Which deployment model are you using for this solution?
Public Cloud
Disclaimer: IT Central Station contacted the reviewer to collect the review and to validate authenticity. The reviewer was referred by the vendor, but the review is not subject to editing or approval by the vendor.
Date published: 2021-08-25T00:00:00-04:00
Rated 5 out of
5 by
Michael Wills from
Balances cost and functionality, speeds up provisioning, and reduces the DNS maintenance work drastically
What is our primary use case?
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.
How has it helped my organization?
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.
What is most valuable?
The provisioning is great. They have an API service that is simple to use and very quick. The changes that we make are replicated worldwide in a matter of usually milliseconds, sometimes seconds. They are done very rapidly. That's something that's obviously priceless when we're dealing with things like DNS.
It is great as an API-first platform for DNS and application traffic management. It is very simple to use. It allows us to rapidly provision and deprovision things. We are all around happy with the solution.
From a metrics standpoint, the solution that we came from had no metrics. So, it has been great. Their service team is excellent in taking the time to provide reports for both growth and strategic planning. It has been great.
What needs improvement?
The reporting metrics are great from an API standpoint, but it would be a little bit nicer if there was some type of dashboard around that. There should also be some type of reporting that's more executive-level focused.
For how long have I used the solution?
I have been using this solution for three to four years.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
You generally hear about things when they're broken, and you do not hear from people when things are going great. Going by that, I haven't heard much of anything one way or the other. Looking at online services that evaluate such things, they're always near the top, and my anecdotal input would be the same. It is very reliable and very stable.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
It can be very easily scaled, but it depends on your company's internal processes.
It provides scalability to help meet SLAs and customers' demands without adding complexity. They're very flexible in what they can provide and very simple in that too. The more simple something is, the more chance there is of its adherence to the standards in the organization.
From an administrative standpoint, there is really no one who is using this solution at this point. Everything has been automated. So, it is mostly hands-off except for what people need to do specifically. From a service standpoint, the entire company uses it. So, it is being extensively used in the organization at the moment, and there is a recognition of its reliability because I've recently had more and more customers who want to start leveraging it.
In terms of our plans to increase its usage, from an architectural standpoint, it is driven by requirements from the business. So, at this time, there may not be immediate recognition around that or even demand, but down the road, I would expect to expand its scope.
How are customer service and support?
I haven't contacted their technical support. I have only interacted with their customer success team. Our experience with them was absolutely positive. They were wonderful. Their service team was excellent in taking the time to provide reports for both growth and strategic planning and helping us with just about everything that they could do from a validation standpoint.
Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?
We did use other solutions previously, but they were non-purpose-driven tools. They were value-added services that Verizon and Sprint, now T-Mobile, sold us. The reasons for switching were scalability and speed of provisioning.
How was the initial setup?
From a setup standpoint, it was very simple. They also had a great customer success team that helped us along the whole way with just about everything that they could do from a validation standpoint.
In terms of duration, if you add up the actual time of doing the work, it was probably days because of the amount of data, but the actual implementation took longer because of the administrative functions imposed by the organization. It was not because of the tool itself.
In terms of the implementation strategy, we had a phased approach. We took low-touch things as an initial test case and then ramped up to run through the rest of the other ones. When migrating to this solution, the downtime was zero.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
From a cost standpoint, it's certainly not the most expensive out there, and it's also not the cheapest, but it does well to balance cost and functionality/reliability.
There are additional costs for different modules if you need them. Otherwise, they can give you very specific pricing for what you need.
To someone who says that they don't need to spend money on a solution like this because they have a free cloud provider or basic DNS, from our specific history, I would say that you get what you pay for. More specifically, NS1 does very well to balance cost and functionality.
Which other solutions did I evaluate?
We went through a number of solutions. We were balancing specific demands at the time with cost. So, we went to a number of solutions and checked different providers for that. We talked to most of the big ones such as Dyn, Cloudflare, and Verisign. We had a couple of others too. What made us go with NS1 was the balancing of cost and features and simplicity. It was much easier to use than a lot of the other tools.
What other advice do I have?
Depending on where you came from, get ready for a much easier administrative life for yourself.
In terms of maintaining uptime during a major DDoS attack, we haven't seen any attack, which can be read into one way or the other. It's part of our architecture to leverage two providers in case there is an issue with one, but as far as I've been able to tell, I haven't seen any outages physically.
It provides integrations that enable full-stack observability with automatic, real-time adjustments, but it is just not how we're architected to leverage their service.
I'd rate it a nine out of ten. I feel there's always room for growth, but from what they have right now, it's a very solid, very reliable, and very wonderful experience product.
Disclaimer: PeerSpot contacted the reviewer to collect the review and to validate authenticity. The reviewer was referred by the vendor, but the review is not subject to editing or approval by the vendor.
Date published: 2022-06-23T00:00:00-04:00
Rated 5 out of
5 by
Casey Bateman from
Significantly easier to deploy vast changes than it was with any of our previous solutions
What is our primary use case?
The biggest thing that we're doing with it is using the load balancing for CDNs.
We are a sports analytics video company for coaches and athletes. We provide learning tools for them to stream their games and practices. Our video is deployed around the world in different Amazon S3 regions, and we use Fastly, CloudFront, and Quantel, depending on the region where a video is accessed. NS1 manages the DNS for our static content. It manages the DNS for our video domains, our JavaScript domains, and for any images that are streamed through our site. That's where NS1 comes into play.
How has it helped my organization?
One of the benefits that we have seen from using NS1 is that it's significantly easier to deploy and make vast changes than it was with any of our previous solutions. Previously, we were with Cedexis and we moved to NS1 when Cedexis decided to freeze platform improvements.
It has also improved our DNS response time over Cedexis by 15 to 20 percent.
The ease of use of their real-time metrics for making decisions has also been a big plus, helping us to validate that our changes were successful in achieving the business use cases we set out to achieve.
And the Pulsar Active Traffic Steering feature has helped us cut costs while optimizing performance.
What is most valuable?
Their Pulsar filters allow us to collect RUM metrics from our users so that we can determine the best paths for our users to take. That has been very useful in providing the best user experience, and for responding to and recovering from downtime of our multiple CDNs.
We also use their Terraform plugins to do our deployment, instead of going through their CLI or their console. We find Terraform to be a really powerful tool when using NS1, and it gives us a changelog of anything that has changed in our DNS.
The fact that it is an API-first platform for DNS and application traffic management is what makes their Terraform solution possible. We haven't used it from the front-end—we use their console from the front-end—but I generally really appreciate any company that goes API-first, because it gives us an ability to really customize our tools to meet our needs.
What needs improvement?
I would love to see improvement in the testing capabilities they provide. They have a simulate-filter feature so that you can simulate how your traffic would flow, based on their Filter Chains. I believe that was shut off for quite some time. Having that as a way to test our load-balanced CDN structure would be fantastic.
For how long have I used the solution?
We've been using NS1 Managed DNS since 2019.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
I've been very happy with the stability of NS1. We haven't encountered any downtime.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
It definitely scales well. We are a global company and have seen our streaming footprint grow and grow, year over year. The ability of NS1 to scale to meet our needs has not been a concern for us. Scaling doesn't add any complexity to our NS1 deployment.
How are customer service and support?
Working with NS1's customer success team has been a fantastic experience. They're very responsive and very willing to help. Altogether, they're a great team to work with.
How would you rate customer service and support?
Positive
Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?
We were evaluating another company at the time and they actually recommended NS1. They had heard multiple people were looking to change from Cedexis, given the Cedexis announcement that they were going to stop development on their platform.
How was the initial setup?
I managed the entire migration from Cedexis to NS1. It was fairly straightforward. There were a couple of things that were a little harder to wrap my head around, such as some of the specifics of some of the filter settings, but overall it was a pretty straightforward process.
Because of the number of domains that were involved, it took us almost exactly one month. There was zero downtime involved in the migration.
What was our ROI?
We have absolutely seen return on our investment. The code deployability and the manageability of the service have saved us a significant amount of time when testing changes that we're considering making to our balancing network.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
We have been very happy with the licensing and pricing. They were able to give us a really good deal on that front, one that matched our expectations.
Which other solutions did I evaluate?
We evaluated a CDN load balancer solution from Nice People at Work as well as a couple of others.
We chose NS1 for several reasons. First, we love the extensibility and the customizability of their Filter Chain setup. We thought that it was unmatched compared to the other offerings on the market, and was going to best replicate what we had with Cedexis, and fit our business use case needs.
We have also started to make a move, across the board, to Terraform as an infrastructure deployment code management solution. The fact that NS1 had, and were regularly updating, their Terraform providers was a big plus for our system.
The manageability, deployability, and overall points of presence around the world, where their DNS system has been deployed, are just fantastic. We did a lot of testing on DNS response when we were first evaluating them, and it was light years ahead of the competition.
What other advice do I have?
The odds are that a free cloud provider is not going to be able to match the performance and the extensibility of a paid solution like NS1. Ultimately, that delayed response is going to affect your users and their impression of your site.
I couldn't recommend a better product than NS1 for managed DNS and CDN load balancing right now. They provide a great solution for managed CDN balancing.
Disclaimer: PeerSpot contacted the reviewer to collect the review and to validate authenticity. The reviewer was referred by the vendor, but the review is not subject to editing or approval by the vendor.
Date published: 2022-05-24T00:00:00-04:00