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Name resolution within the infrastructure is vital. Enterprises use name resolution because they need a convenient way of reaching out to their systems over the network using standard hostnames or FQDN’s and also because they want to avoid unpleasant situations where hardcoded network addresses contained within code or apps. Hardcoding equals with bad things are going to happen anytime soon 🙂

What it used to be a common practice up to now, was to build and maintain a DNS infrastructure for your cloud resources mainly consisting of Virtual Machines running Windows or Linux. By this, in the end, eventually would allow you to provide custom name resolution within your environment in the most consistent manner other than using non-recommended techniques such as host files.

Ok, nicely put, I already operate on Azure and I need to provide name resolution for my workloads, what should do I?

And the answer is, make use of the cloud-native solutions that Azure provides! Azure has a cloud-native solution for these kinds of scenarios, the name of it “Azure private DNS zones”.

With Azure private DNS zones, you can provide custom name resolution for your Azure workloads within a virtual network, with the most robust, easy to maintain, and cost-effective manner. Simple as that!

other than this, Azure Private DNS Zones comes with the following capabilities:

  • Custom Name resolution between virtual networks
  • Split-horizon DNS support
  • Dynamic registration of records
  • Support for all common DNS record types
  • Available in all Azure regions
  • Available across regions
  • Available across subscriptions

Create an Azure private DNS zone using the Azure portal

Link Virtual Networks with the private DNS zone and enable auto-registration

Creating record sets and testing the private zone

Hint-1: linking virtual networks simultaneously with different Azure private DNS zones is supported.

Hint-2: auto-registration is supported only with one linked private DNS zone at a time. Meaning that, if a virtual network is linked with a private DNS zone with auto-registration enabled, then it can be linked with a different DNS zone but auto-registration won’t work.

Thanks for reading!