I've been facing DNS issues recently while working as an engineer for a US-based company that heavily relies on various SaaS applications. Over the past couple of weeks, we've noticed a significant drop in performance, especially with app latency. Upon checking, I discovered that queries to our required services were returning IP addresses from AWS data centers located in Germany and France, instead of US regions where they should be connected.
We use Quad9 as our DNS provider, but it appears to be prioritizing overseas datacenters. After switching to Google and Cloudflare as our DNS forwarders, the response times dropped from around 160ms to just 3ms, greatly improving performance. Has anyone else encountered similar issues with Quad9 directing traffic to incorrect locations for AWS services?
4 Answers
Why not just set up your own DNS resolver? That way you can control how everything is routed and avoid these public DNS issues all together.
It’s wild how a small percentage of AWS servers can be so impacted by outages while managing your own data center can lead to much more stable service. What's the deal with Amazon lately?
This happens a lot when using public DNS services like Quad9, which may not give you the best local resolution due to privacy settings. If you want better results, consider using their resolver at 9.9.9.11, which takes your location into account better than their default options. Check out their support on EDNS Client-Subnet for better insights on improving your routing.
Have you checked with Quad9's support? Sometimes they need to be alerted about routing issues. Also, try running your WAN IP through a GEO-IP lookup to see where it's registering. It could be a mix-up with how your ISP is routing IPs.
Yeah, I'll definitely look into that! Didn’t think my ISP could be part of the problem.
Exactly! Quad9's privacy features keep DNS requests anonymous, but that also means you might not get optimal routing from them.