What is Azure DNS?
Azure DNS is a cloud service that allows you to host and manage domain name system (DNS) domains, also known as DNS zones. A DNS zone is a collection of DNS records. DNS records can relate a Fully Qualified Domain Name (FQDN) associated with the zone to an IP address or another DNS record. For example, www.tailwindtraders.com (a host record) mapping to a specific IP address (40.71.177.34).
Azure DNS allows you to manage DNS zone data using the Azure portal, Azure PowerShell, the Azure CLI, and Rest APIs. Instead of having to manage DNS zone data through a third-party DNS provider or hosting and managing a DNS Server service yourself on a physical server or virtual machine, you can manage DNS zone data related to Azure resources using your Azure management toolkit. If you choose to use Azure DNS to host the tailwindtraders.com DNS zone, you can manage zone data using Azure tools rather than using a separate set of tools provided by the domain registrar.
Since Azure DNS is hosted on Microsoft's Azure infrastructure, the service is more resilient to network failures than DNS services hosted on individual servers managed by your organization or third parties. If a DNS service hosting important DNS zone data such as the records for your organization's website or email server becomes unavailable, those services will likely not function correctly. For example, a DNS server outage not only can stop people from being able to navigate to your organization's website, but it can also stop people from being able to email others in your organization!
You can fully integrate Azure DNS with Azure resources. Azure DNS provides functionality allowing you to automatically update records based on when you deploy or modify resources in Azure. For example, if you weren't using Azure DNS and you choose to deploy a web application that you want to associate with the custom FQDN app.tailwindtraders.com, you'll need to create or update the host record for app.tailwindtraders.com in the tailwindtraders.com DNS zone to point to the web app's IP address on a DNS server that you manage separately. With Azure DNS, you can automate the process of configuring and updating DNS records. If you move the web app to a new location, the Azure DNS record associated with that web app will automatically be updated.
Azure DNS supports all common DNS record types including A, AAAA, CNAME, MX, PTR, SOA, SRV, and TXT records. Azure DNS supports records that map to both IPv4 and IPv6 addresses, and Azure DNS servers can be reached by clients using both IPv4 and IPv6 addresses.