How to Set up an Alibaba Cloud Private DNS Zone for Internal Name Resolution

This article explains how to set up an Alibaba Cloud Private DNS Zone for internal name resolution.

By Kelvin Galabuzi

What Is Alibaba Cloud DNS?

Alibaba Cloud DNS is a secure, fast, and reliable DNS service. Alibaba Cloud DNS can receive an SLA of 100%, ensuring applications are always ready to serve traffic globally. The service also utilizes global nodes deployed worldwide to ensure users can access the closest nodes with low latency.

Alibaba Cloud DNS Services

Alibaba Cloud DNS Public Zone: Public zones are used to route traffic from external sources to Alibaba Cloud DNS provided DNS servers to resolve traffic destined to your applications.
Alibaba Cloud DNS Private Zone: Private zones are used to route traffic within' Virtual Private Cloud (VPCs), ensuring secure and private communication between services, such as ECS instances. In addition, private zones support hybrid cloud setups where you can share private domain name records with your on-premise environment and the target VPC. Private zones also support reverse lookup using PTR records.
Global Traffic Manager: Alibaba Global Traffic Manager (GTM) allows you to balance concurrent traffic across multiple nodes. Traffic and access are forwarded to the nearest node where your applications are running to ensure the low latency of globally deployed applications.
Secondary DNS: Alibaba Cloud Secondary DNS is used to provide DNS resolution for users in a case where your primary DNS servers are down. Secondary DNS enables load balancing of the DNS resolution service and features high availability for your applications. In addition, Alibaba Cloud automatically synchronizes resource records from your primary DNS server to the secondary server.

Creating an Alibaba Cloud Private DNS Zone for Internal Name Resolution

Step 1: In the Alibaba Cloud Console, access the Alibaba Cloud DNS service:

Step 2: Select the Private Zone blade and click Add Zone:

Step 3: Add the Zone Name you want to configure for Internal name resolution and click OK:

Step 4: Select Bind VPC and click Add Record:

Step 5: A box will pop up; click Add Record:

Step 6: Add the first DNS record. In the following example, we add a private IPv4 record that resolves to the web server in my Virtual Private Cloud (VPC):

Step 7: After adding the record, go back to the private zone settings to bind a VPC:

Step 8: If you want to bind a Virtual Private Cloud (VPC), select your account, the VPC region, the specific VPC, and click Confirm:

Step 9: Finally, the Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) will show up as successfully bound:

Step 10: If you want to test for name resolution, access a server on the same Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) and ping the resource record added to the private zone. The ping should be successful if ping traffic is allowed on your security groups: