On the DNS Deployment of Modern Web Services

Accessing Internet services relies on the Domain Name System (DNS) for translating human-readable names to routable network addresses. At the bottom level of the DNS hierarchy, the authoritative DNS (ADNS) servers maintain the actual mapping records and answer the DNS queries. Today, the increasing use of upstream ADNS services (i.e., third-party ADNS-hosting services) and Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) clouds facilitates the establishment of web services, and has been fostering the evolution of the deployment of ADNS servers. To shed light on this trend, in this paper we present a large-scale measurement to study the ADNS deployment patterns of modern web services and examine the characteristics of different deployment styles, such as performance, life-cycle of servers, and availability. Furthermore, we focus specifically on the DNS deployment for subdomains hosted in IaaS clouds.