Benefits of DNS Network Automation

In today’s fast-paced world, one of the biggest commodities is time. This is especially true for businesses trying to maximize their ROI. For organizations that invest in their employees and look for ways to optimize processes so that teams can perform their best work, automation is a logical and attractive solution. 

An area that can greatly benefit from automation is network and DNS tasks. 

What is Network Automation?

Automating network resources entails the use of software designed to increase efficiency, reliability, and functionality. It also reduces human error that can result from manual network tasks. Almost any aspect of a network controlled by an application programming interface (API) or command-line interface (CLI) can be automated. Automation is achieved via software, scripts, or artificial intelligence (AI).

Why Use DNS Automation?

When all of a company’s DNS is handled manually, it increases the risk of errors or complications that can lead to network slowdowns or even outages. It can also create bottlenecks for DevOps teams working in cloud environments that utilize automated testing, configuration, and deployment workflows. 

Implementing automated DNS can solve these problems.

Constellix was built from the ground up by IT for IT. Alongside advanced DNS services, a major focus of development was creating efficient workflows and task automation. From our own experience, as well as what data shows from recent studies, we’ve found that automation cuts down on human error by as much as 80%. It’s also been proven that automation increases productivity. A 2021 Salesforce report found that in 75% of businesses, automation saved up to four hours a work week and equated to an overall time savings of 66% for IT and engineering teams. In a survey by Work Market, 78% of respondents agreed that automating tasks would increase productivity levels across the organization and make them more competitive in the marketplace. 

Because repetitive and select complex tasks can be automated, more time can be dedicated to creative, higher-level projects. In its 2020 State of Network Automation report, Juniper found that automation also increased job satisfaction and helped network administrators exceed organizational goals by 67%. 

How Do Network Automation and DNS Work Together?

When teams are working in network environments that utilize automation, traditional DNS processes can sometimes become an impediment. This is due to teams having to manually configure DNS. Automating and optimizing these tasks when able solves this issue and ensures a more seamless process.

What Types Of DNS Tasks Can be Automated at Constellix?

There are several ways to automate or significantly cut down on manual DNS tasks in Constellix. 

DevOps and Automation: Constellix API Solutions

Our platform was designed to fit seamlessly into deployment workflows. We take an API-first approach to DNS so that cloud providers and MSPs can quickly and easily manage and maintain large volumes of domains and DNS records. With our API, you can manage your infrastructure with your own code and all changes are instantly propagated to our global network. You can also automate network microservices, such as DNS records that correspond with your services, monitoring, failover configurations, and bulk updates. 

Rest API Support at Constellix:

• Ruby
• cURL
• JQuery
• Python
• Node
• PHP
• Go

Sonar Performance Monitoring

Sonar is our proprietary performance monitoring suite and the backbone of our traffic management services. With Sonar, you can automate traffic decisions based on the health of your endpoints. Once health checks are configured, your traffic will always be sent to the best-performing resource, thus eliminating unnecessary downtime or sluggish performance. 

Sonar performs health checks on your endpoints in 30-second to 24-hour intervals (depending on your selection) to ensure flawless traffic execution. Teams also receive instant notifications for when a resource goes down and when it returns online. You’ll always know what endpoint is returning queries, but won’t have the stress of manually redirecting traffic to another resource every time a server or system goes down or experiences issues.

DNS Templates

While not a fully automated process, our DNS templates allow you to configure DNS records and settings that can be shared across domains. This is immensely helpful for MSPs and organizations that manage multiple domains. Once a template is configured and applied, any change to the template will automatically update records and settings for any domain using the template. This saves a lot of time and virtually eliminates human error.

How DNS Automation Can Lower IT Costs and Increase Productivity

Automation cuts down on menial and repetitive tasks, as well as performance monitoring tasks, which frees up time for DevOps teams to focus on larger projects. Network and DNS automation also eliminates a significant amount of mistakes due to human error. A single typo or simple misconfiguration can literally cause a domain to go down. Even brief periods of outages are costly for organizations. For small businesses, this can range from $137-427 per minute, but can be upward of $1 million an hour for Fortune 1,000 companies. Luckily, once network and DNS tasks are properly set up, automated deployments ensure changes are seamless across a large volume of processes, domains, or DNS records.

DNS Automation Strategies

If you want to save money, increase employee productivity, cut down on mistakes, and ensure constant uptime and optimal performance for your domain, automating available DNS tasks is a no-brainer. Using Constellix services such as API, automated performance monitoring, advanced DNS Failover, load balancing, bulk changes, and DNS templates will make IT teams more efficient and even improve job satisfaction. It also helps prevent deployment bottlenecks in cloud environments that can occur when DNS is configured and updated manually.

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AUTOMATION SOURCES:

Teams using automation outperform those that don’t by 10%. (Juniper)

50% of organizations automate in production networks (Juniper)

78% of Cloud Providers use network automation in some capacity (Juniper)

Automation has been shown to increase job satisfaction by as much as 18% (Juniper)

71% of organizations implement automation to increase productivity (Businesswire)

68% of automation projects are commissioned to maintain network availability (Businesswire)

Approximately 70% of service and data center outages is caused by human error (Uptime Institute)

59% of IT professionals cite lack of time to learn on the job as a reason for not developing automation practices (Juniper)

As much as 80% of network failures are due to human error (Technologent)

It’s predicted that by 2024, organizations will lower operational costs by 30% from automation and redesigned operational processes. (Cisco)

82% of surveyed employees claim automation simplifies organizational processes (Integromat)

80% of surveyed organizations in highly automated environments claim automation improved productivity by 80% and a 72% increase in creativity time. (Integromat)