Improving authoritative DNS with the official release of Foundation DNS

We are very excited to announce the official release of Foundation DNS, with new advanced nameservers, even more resilience, and advanced analytics to meet the complex requirements of our enterprise customers. Foundation DNS is one of Cloudflare's largest leaps forward in our authoritative DNS offering since its launch in 2010, and we know our customers are interested in an enterprise-ready authoritative DNS service with the highest level of performance, reliability, security, flexibility, and advanced analytics.

Starting today, every new enterprise contract that includes authoritative DNS will have access to the Foundation DNS feature set and existing enterprise customers will have Foundation DNS features made available to them over the course of this year. If you are an existing enterprise customer already using our authoritative DNS services, and you’re interested in getting your hands on Foundation DNS earlier, just reach out to your account team, and they can enable it for you. Let’s get started…

Why is DNS so important?

From an end user perspective, DNS makes the Internet usable. DNS is the phone book of the Internet which translates hostnames like www.cloudflare.com into IP addresses that our browsers, applications, and devices use to connect to services. Without Continue reading

One of our most requested features is here: DNS record comments and tags

Starting today, we’re adding support on all zone plans to add custom comments on your DNS records. Users on the Pro, Business and Enterprise plan will also be able to tag DNS records.

DNS records are important

DNS records play an essential role when it comes to operating a website or a web application. In general, they are used to mapping human-readable hostnames to machine-readable information, most commonly IP addresses. Besides mapping hostnames to IP addresses they also fulfill many other use cases like:

• Ensuring emails can reach your inbox, by setting up MX records.
• Avoiding email spoofing and phishing by configuring SPF, DMARC and DKIM policies as TXT records.
• Validating a TLS certificate by adding a TXT (or CNAME) record.
• Specifying allowed certificate authorities that can issue certificates on behalf of your domain by creating a CAA record.
• Validating ownership of your domain for other web services (website hosting, email hosting, web storage, etc.) - usually by creating a TXT record.
• And many more.

With all these different use cases, it is easy to forget what a particular DNS record is for and it is not always possible to derive the purpose from the name, type and Continue reading

Wildcard proxy for everyone

Today, I have the pleasure to announce that we’re giving everyone the ability to proxy DNS wildcard records. Previously, this feature was only available to our Enterprise customers. After many of our free and pay-as-you-go users reached out, we decided that this feature should be available to everyone.

What is a wildcard DNS record?

A DNS record usually maps a domain name to one or multiple IP addresses or another resource associated with that name, so it’s a one-to-many mapping. Let’s look at an example:

When I do a DNS lookup for the IP address of subdomain1.mycoolwebpage.xyz, I get two IP addresses back, because I have added two A records on that subdomain:

$ dig subdomain1.mycoolwebpage.xyz -t a +short
192.0.2.1
192.0.2.2

I could specify the target of all subdomains like this, with one or multiple DNS records per subdomain. But what if I have hundreds or even thousands of subdomains that I all want to point to the same resource?

This is where a wildcard DNS record comes in. By using the asterisk symbol "*" in the Name field, I can create one or multiple DNS records that are Continue reading

Announcing Foundation DNS — Cloudflare’s new premium DNS offering

Today, we’re announcing Foundation DNS, Cloudflare’s new premium DNS offering that provides unparalleled reliability, supreme performance and is able to meet the most complex requirements of infrastructure teams.

Let’s talk money first

When you’re signing an enterprise DNS deal, usually DNS providers request three inputs from you in order to generate a quote:

• Number of zones
• Total DNS queries per month
• Total DNS records across all zones

Some are considerably more complicated and many have pricing calculators or opaque “Contact Us” pricing. Planning a budget around how you may grow brings unnecessary complexity, and we think we can do better. Why not make this even simpler? Here you go: We decided to charge Foundation DNS based on a single input for our enterprise customers: Total DNS queries per month. This way, we expect to save companies money and even more importantly, remove complexity from their DNS bill.

And don’t worry, just like the rest of our products, DDoS mitigation is still unmetered. There won’t be any hidden overage fees in case your nameservers are DDoS’d or the number of DNS queries exceeds your quota for a month or two.

Why is DNS so important?

The Domain Name System (DNS) Continue reading

Tackling Email Spoofing and Phishing

Today we’re rolling out a new tool to tackle email spoofing and phishing and improve email deliverability: The new Email Security DNS Wizard can be used to create DNS records that prevent others from sending malicious emails on behalf of your domain. This new feature also warns users about insecure DNS configurations on their domain and shows recommendations on how to fix them. The feature will first be rolled out to users on the Free plan and over the next weeks be made available for Pro, Business and Enterprise customers, as well.

Before we dive into what magic this wizard is capable of, let’s take a step back and take a look at the problem: email spoofing and phishing.

What is email spoofing and phishing?

Spoofing is the process of posing as someone else which can be used in order to gain some kind of illicit advantage. One example is domain spoofing where someone hosts a website like mycoolwebpaqe.xyz  to trick users of mycoolwebpage.xyz to provide sensitive information without knowing they landed on a false website. When looking at the address bar side by side in a browser, it’s very hard to spot the difference.

Then, there is Continue reading