Update May 18, 2016: The signup period for Managed DNS (Early Access) is now closed.

For the past year, Rackspace DNS engineers and internal users have been evaluating, testing and contributing to OpenStack Designate (DNS-as-a-service). We have now deployed Designate on our globally available, highly redundant Anycast DNS infrastructure and are excited to announce Early Access Rackspace Managed DNS powered by OpenStack Designate.

If you have a Rackspace Cloud account and would like to participate in Early Access, sign up here .

For any size business, the DNS, or Domain Name System, is vital to getting and keeping a strong online and email presence. Those without the time or resources required to run a secure and highly available DNS infrastructure use a hosting provider to remove the complexity while simplifying DNS management through a user interface and/or API.

In 2011, Rackspace launched our popular Rackspace Cloud DNS service to do just that.

Since then, we’ve seen the need to deliver additional performance and usability improvements to DNS management, and we wanted to do so with the vendor neutrality and flexibility of OpenStack. We’ve also heard our customers ask us to help them achieve higher confidence when performing the serious and sometimes scary task of setting up and managing DNS configurations for their more critical business applications.

The Rackspace Managed DNS (Early Access) service offers DNS provisioning and management capabilities with full TTL control, as well as the following API performance and usability improvements (compared to our current Rackspace Cloud DNS API); see the Rackspace Managed DNS (Early Access) Developer Guide for more details.

Additional benefits include:

2x improvement for all record rate limits

2x improvement for all GET rate limits

10x higher zone (domain) quota per account

6x higher record quota per zone (domain)

Supported command line interface (CLI)

Immediate zone/record validation before the asynchronous process starts

Imports and exports in pure BIND9 zone file format; no more parsing to and from XML or JSON

Built-in status monitoring for asynchronous responses eliminates the need to keep checking a separate endpoint.

Consuming our OpenStack-based API for DNS management enables you to automate DNS for public OpenStack deployments using a familiar, standardized RESTful API and without writing custom, vendor-specific code.

What’s Next?

The Managed DNS Early Access phase is API-only, but we’re also hard at work to apply these and other improvements to DNS management within our Rackspace Cloud Control Panel. We want to make it easier and faster for our customers to view, search and manage their DNS configuration, which can be especially important to customers with hundreds to thousands of zones (domains) and records to manage.

At Rackspace, everything we do is managed, and our follow up Unlimited Availability phase will include the world-class Fanatical Support we’re known for. That means when you host DNS at Rackspace, you don’t have to do this DNS management thing alone! We’ll be here to help you with things like troubleshooting, assist with configuration needs and escalate potential issues.

Until then, give the new Rackspace Managed DNS (Early Access) service a try and let us know what you think and how we can improve. See below for a preview of how it works!