DNS

The Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Domain Name System (DNS) service lets you create and manage your DNS zones. You can create zones, add records to zones, and allow Oracle Cloud Infrastructure's edge network to handle your domain's DNS queries.

See Supported Resource Records for additional information.

Tip

Watch a video introduction to the service.

DNS Service Components

The following list describes the components used to build a DNS zone and make it accessible from the internet.

DOMAIN: Domain names identify a specific location or group of locations on the Internet as a whole. A common definition of "domain" is the complete portion of the DNS tree that has been delegated to a user's control. For example, example.com or oracle.com.
ZONE: A zone is a portion of the DNS namespace. A Start of Authority record (SOA) defines a zone. A zone contains all labels underneath itself in the tree, unless otherwise specified.
LABEL: Labels are prepended to the zone name, separated by a period, to form the name of a subdomain. For example, the "www" section of www.example.com or the "docs" and "us-ashburn-1" sections of docs.us-ashburn-1.oraclecloud.com are labels. Records are associated with these domains.
CHILD ZONE: Child zones are independent subdomains with their own Start of Authority and Name Server (NS) records. The parent zone of a child zone must contain NS records that refer DNS queries to the name servers responsible for the child zone. Each subsequent child zone creates another link in the delegation chain.
RESOURCE RECORDS: A record contains specific domain information for a zone. Each record type contains information called record data (RDATA). For example, the RDATA of an A or AAAA record contains an IP address for a domain name, while MX records contain information about the mail server for a domain. OCI normalizes all RDATA into the most machine readable format. The returned presentation of your RDATA may differ from its initial input. For more information about RDATA, please see Supported DNS Resource Record Types.
DELEGATION: The name servers where your DNS is hosted and managed.

Ways to Access the DNS Service

You can access Oracle Cloud Infrastructure using the Console (a browser-based interface) or the DNS REST API. Instructions for the Console and API are included in topics throughout this guide.

To access the Console, you must use a supported browser. To go to the Console sign-in page, open the navigation menu at the top of this page and click Infrastructure Console. You are prompted to enter your cloud tenant, your user name, and your password.

Authentication and Authorization

Each service in Oracle Cloud Infrastructure integrates with IAM for authentication and authorization, for all interfaces (the Console, SDK or CLI, and REST API).

An administrator in your organization needs to set up groups , compartments , and policies that control which users can access which services, which resources, and the type of access. For example, the policies control who can create new users, create and manage the cloud network, launch instances, create buckets, download objects, etc. For more information, see Getting Started with Policies. For specific details about writing policies for each of the different services, see Policy Reference.

If you’re a regular user (not an administrator) who needs to use the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure resources that your company owns, contact your administrator to set up a user ID for you. The administrator can confirm which compartment or compartments you should be using.

Monitoring Resources

You can monitor the health, capacity, and performance of your Oracle Cloud Infrastructure resources by using metrics, alarms, and notifications. For more information, see Monitoring and Notifications.

For information about available DNS service metrics and how to view them, see DNS Metrics.

DNS Service Capabilities and Limits

The Oracle Cloud Infrastructure DNS service is limited to 1000 zones per account and 25,000 records per zone. Customers with zone and record size needs exceeding these values are encouraged to contact support at support.oracle.com. Zone file uploads are limited to 1 megabyte (MB) in size per zone file. If your zone file is larger than 1 MB, you will need to split the zone file into smaller batches to upload all of the zone information.

For more information and a workaround for this limitation, see Zone File Limitations and Considerations.

Required IAM Service Policy

To use Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, you must be granted security access in a policy by an administrator. This access is required whether you're using the Console or the REST API with an SDK, CLI, or other tool. If you get a message that you don’t have permission or are unauthorized, verify with your administrator what type of access you have and which compartment to work in.

If you're new to policies, see Getting Started with Policies and Common Policies. For more details about policies for DNS, see Details for the DNS Service.

Permissions are required for managing DNS. The level of access is cumulative as you go from inspect > read > use > manage. For example, the read verb covers permissions to read and inspect. The manage verb covers permissions for inspect, read, update, create, delete, and move.

Policy examples:

To enable all operations on zones for a specific user group:

Allow group <GroupName> to manage dns in tenancy <TenancyName>

To enable a specific group to read zones:

Allow group <GroupName> to read dns-zones in tenancy <TenancyName>

To create a read only DNS management group:

Allow group <GroupName> to read dns in tenancy <TenancyName>