NS1 extends suite of integrations to offer control over app and infrastructure resources

NS1, a leader in next generation DNS and application traffic management solutions, announced the expansion of its suite of integrations to include Kubernetes, Consul, Avi Networks (VMWare NSX), NGINX, and HAProxy.

These new integrations allow customers to seamlessly connect industry-leading technologies to improve automation, velocity, and scale for modern enterprise application development and delivery.

Modern enterprises are deploying increasingly complex application stacks distributed across multiple infrastructure resources to improve resiliency and application performance. This creates challenges for application teams who need to automate and scale processes while delivering the best user experiences.

These integrations, combined with the company’s API-first DNS, DHCP, and IP address management (DDI) solutions, give customers greater control over the management of infrastructure resources for increased efficiency and improved data-driven application traffic management for optimal performance.

“Companies are continuously making investments in technologies that better enable the development and delivery of their applications. In order to maximize the return on those investments, it’s imperative that these traditionally independent services and tools are integrated so they can communicate and share data seamlessly,” said Jonathan Sullivan, co-founder and chief technology officer at NS1.

“NS1’s robust suite of integrations and API-first design enable our customers to build a cohesive application strategy that optimizes delivery across their entire application stack, regardless of its composition.”

DevOps automation and service discovery

Containers and microservices make it possible for DevOps and infrastructure teams to build and deploy new applications and iterations at increasing velocity and scale, but the dynamic nature and complexity of this approach creates challenges for orchestration and service discovery.

By integrating with development tools and container ecosystems, NS1 automates the creation of DNS records for new resources, lifting registry data into shared DNS namespace.

As such, NS1 becomes a global system of record and critical service discovery mechanism across a complex heterogeneous enterprise environment regardless of the orchestration system being used.

This enables teams to develop and deploy applications at enterprise velocity and scale without the drag of manual record creation or hardcoding to ensure communication between platforms—both outside and inside the firewall.

In addition to existing integrations with popular development tools, including Ansible, Terraform, and Apache Mesos, new integrations include:

• Kubernetes – NS1 integrates with the Kubernetes External DNS incubator project, which monitors the ingress/services for updates coming from the web application service and then sends the information as a DNS record to the NS1 platform.
• Consul – With the Consul integration, NS1’s management portal becomes a single pane of glass for Consul services, allowing for automated record generation and the use of NS1’s Filter Chain technology to load balance across Consul instances.

Cohesive global traffic steering strategy

Building a high-performance enterprise application requires investing in scalable architecture, optimizing static resources, and building a cohesive global traffic strategy that effectively routes traffic across distributed infrastructure—multiple clouds, data centers, and content delivery networks.

An important component of this strategy is global server load balancing (GSLB), which allows traffic teams to steer application traffic to better-performing points of presence to ensure high availability and the best application performance.

NS1 integrates seamlessly with customers’ load balancing footprint to drive global steering decisions based on high-frequency local data. In near real time, rich metrics—such as system load, connection counts, or client response times—are pushed to the edge of NS1’s Managed DNS platforms, where they are paired with real user monitoring (RUM) and other metrics to ensure the most intelligent traffic routing decisions for each and every query.

NGINX – The integration of NS1 and NGINX combines two powerful solutions to provide granular visibility into the health of infrastructure and greater control over your traffic management policies. Robust and intuitive API configuration tools simplify the implementation process—making it easy to scale complex configurations.

Avi/VMWare NSX – NS1 integrates with Avi Networks (now VMWare NSX) to enable high-velocity global load balancing and performance-based traffic management across multi-cloud infrastructure.

Customers can push rich metrics from virtual services (NSX ALB) to NS1 where the data is combined with telemetry, like RUM, in order to optimize end-user experiences, uptime, and security. Supported metrics include up/down status as well as custom metrics—including load, active connections, and requests per second.

HAProxy – In any distributed application environment, load shedding is a critical tool that can help optimize application delivery by preventing outages related to load or capacity constraints at the data center level. When integrated with HAProxy, NS1 ingests relevant metrics directly from HAProxy load balancers to perform intelligent load shedding.

NS1’s engineering team is consistently building new integrations that solve key customer challenges.