[mvanaltvorst]

What role does Akamai Edge DNS play in normal internet traffic? DNS responses usually get cached, as far as I understand correctly. And it is usually possible to change your DNS server to e.g. Google's and circumvent the outage. Does Akamai Edge DNS play a role on the server side?

[uncertainrhymes]

If you use a CDN to front your traffic, you need the CNAME for www (or whatever) to be pointing at their DNS infrastructure, so they can return whichever closest POP is going to serve your traffic.

e.g. dig @1.1.1.1 www.nvidia.com +trace

... various things from the root ...

www.nvidia.com. 7200 IN CNAME www.nvidia.com.edgekey.net. ;; Received 83 bytes from 208.94.148.13#53(ns5.dnsmadeeasy.com) in 35 ms

So the main DNS is fine, but it'll never get an A record because the last link in the chain is toast -- edgekey being Akamai in this case, but all CDNs do this so they can route traffic. Normally, this is a good thing so they can shift traffic within 30 seconds on their side. Unfortunately, it also means it would take nvidia an two hours to point away from Akamai.

[carlsborg]

Looks like this: the affected subdomains are CNAMEd to the akamai CDN, and the Nameserver for those are/were down.

So for example:

Top level domain for nvidia resolved fine..

dig @1.1.1.1 nvidia.com => status: NOERROR, Nameservers are ns6.dnsmadeeasy.com

But the website didnt. dig @1.1.1.1 www.nvidia.com => status: SERVFAIL,

The Nameserver for the this www.nvidia resolved to the akamai nameserver which had a problem..

dig @1.1.1.1 www.nvidia.com NS => CNAME e33907.a.akamaiedge.net.

[r1ch]

The trend these days are DNS TTLs of 60 - 300 seconds, to allow "Cloud agility" or something, so sites are exposed to a much larger risk of authoritative nameservers going down.

[jameshart]

You say that like it's a bad idea.

Services like Akamai use short TTLs for their edge services for a variety of reasons, not least because if one of their edge servers goes offline (for planned or unplanned reasons) it lets them sub in a new one and have it receive traffic immediately, rather than have a bunch of clients continue trying to talk to a dead node. So sure, you can increase those TTLs to trade 'what if the DNS server goes down?' risk with 'what if the edge server goes down?' risk...

But keeping the edge servers up and running is probably a lot harder - they need to scale more to handle traffic load, they have to actually handle client data, TLS termination, much more complex configuration.... so if I'm placing bets on which of those things is more likely to die on me, it's the edge node, not the DNS server.

[NeckBeardPrince]

> What role does Akamai Edge DNS play in normal internet traffic?

Clearly a big one.