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I run a smallish website on Google App Engine. Currently, I use Dreamhost for other things and I buy my domains through them and they provide the name servers.

I'm in the process of switching domain management to Google Domains. I believe Google Domains also provides name servers that I expect will work at least as well as the Dreamhost name servers.

Google also provides Google Cloud DNS which seems to provide the same functionality as the Google Domains name servers but costs money (albeit not much).

What advantages does Google Cloud DNS have over the Google Domain name servers?

CLARIFICATION EDIT:

I know what the two services are and have read a lot of documentation on both so no need to repeat the basics.

For a small website, Google Domains DNS is clearly adequate. For a large website on the scale of serverfault.com, I suspect that Google Domains DNS would not be adequate and you would need to use something more sophisticated like Google Cloud DNS.

I'd like to know what limitations there are to Google Domains DNS so I have a better understanding of when I need to switch to Google Cloud DNS.

Sunny J
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minou
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3 Answers3

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Google Domains is a registrar which also offers a DNS service; Google Cloud DNS is a pure cloud-based DNS service, which doesn't handle domain registration but offers higher control and more features on the service itself.

When you register a domain, there are two steps involved: the actual registration and the handling of the DNS service for the domain. Most providers offer both services, and that's what Google Domains also does.

However, you could also manage the DNS service for your domain in many different ways (including running your own DNS servers). Google Cloud DNS provides you with a full-featured cloud-based DNS service, which you can use to manage DNS for your domain regardless of where and how you actually registered it.

As to choosing a solution over another... this strongly depends on your requirements. If your requirement is to run a web site (however large), then all you need is putting some A or CNAME records in your domain, and both solutions are perfectly adequate.

chicks
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Massimo
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UPDATE: from Google Domains Help: Google Domains pricing and supported TLDs: One important thing to note in default features lists among others:

Features included at no additional cost

  • Google nameservers with 10 million DNS resolutions per year

And also note: Google Domains is currently available only for users in the US, as mentioned here.

Whereas, in case of Cloud DNS https://cloud.google.com/dns/

Use Google’s infrastructure for production quality, high volume DNS serving. Your users will have reliable, low-latency access to Google’s infrastructure from anywhere in the world using our network of Anycast name servers.

  • $0.40 per 1M queries / month for the first 1B queries
  • $0.20 per 1M queries / month for additional queries. etc..

So, there you see the differences on the volume of dns resolutions and infrastructure in offer. Clearly Goolgle Cloud is targetting customers with higher requiremtns with global presence and large dns request volumes.

If you take a little time to go through this official page on Google Cloud DNS, it answers all the qustions that you have:

What is Google Cloud DNS?

Nevertheless, one big difference is, apart from Google Cloud Platform, it offers one the possibility to manage dns records thruogh scripts (using gcloud command line tool) or programs (using REST API):

...Google Cloud DNS lets you publish your zones and records in the DNS without the burden of managing your own DNS servers and software. You use the gcloud tool or the REST API directly to work with Cloud DNS...

As for your situation, where you are running just a small website, I personally don't see any need for any of those.

Diamond
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You'd mostly use Cloud DNS for the convenience of having it right there in the control panel. Only Google can say, but I'd bet the underlying infrastructure is nearly the same, but with some amount of DNS service (which is mostly cheap to provide, especially for low-volume sites) built into the price.

Cloud DNS is awesome because you can use a REST API, the gcloud tool, and other ways to update/interact with it. For this reason, it's probably a good idea to switch now, because it's clear that when you need advanced features, they will be available via Cloud DNS and not Google Domains DNS.

It seems to me that they are essentially the same product, but geared at different markets: people who need DNS but don't know what it is (Domains DNS), and people who need DNS services and understand why, and want to manage it centrally with their other resources (i.e. App Engine, etc). Cloud DNS is pretty cheap and fwiw we use it and love it.

Sam Gammon
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