Announcing Cloud DNS forwarding: Unifying hybrid cloud naming

A key part of a successful hybrid cloud strategy is making sure your resources can find each other via DNS, whether they are in the cloud or on-prem. Rather than create separate islands of DNS namespaces, we’ve added new forwarding capability to Cloud DNS, our managed DNS service, letting you easily link your cloud and on-prem environments, so you can use the same DNS service for all your workloads and resources.

Built with Cloud DNS’ new network policy capability, DNS forwarding allows you to create bi-directional forwarding zones between your on-prem name servers and Google Cloud Platform’s internal name servers. Currently in beta, DNS forwarding provides the following features and benefits:

• Outbound forwarding lets your GCP resources use your existing DNS authoritative servers on-prem, including BIND, Active Directory, etc.
  
• Inbound forwarding allows on-prem (or other cloud resources) to resolve names via Cloud DNS.
  
• Intelligent Google caching improves the performance of your queries;  cached queries do not travel over your connectivity links.
  
• DNS forwarding is a fully managed service—no need to use additional software or your own compute and support resources.

In a nutshell, DNS forwarding provides a first-class GCP managed service to connect your DNS cloud and on-prem environments, providing unified naming for your workloads and resources. Further, you can use DNS forwarding for inbound traffic, outbound traffic, or both, to support existing or future network architecture needs.

DNS is a critical component of tying hybrid cloud architectures together. DNS forwarding in combination with GCP connectivity solutions such as Cloud Interconnect and Cloud VPN creates a seamless and secure network environment between your GCP cloud and on-prem data centers. To learn more, check out the DNS forwarding documentation and get started using DNS forwarding today.