DNS zones

A DNS zone is a logical space that combines the domain names of your resources and stores the necessary resource records. There are two types of DNS zones: public and private. Regardless of the type, they have a hierarchy: a zone may have one or more subzones. There is a separate hierarchy of reverse zones.

You can manage the hierarchy of cloud resources and route DNS requests. For example, you can create subzones for the production and test environments and, within them, subzones for applications, DB clusters, caching servers, and more.

The Yandex Cloud resource model is used to control access to zones, subzones, and resource records.
If a public zone is registered in Yandex Cloud:

• To create a subzone, you need the rights to manage the parent zone.
• To manage a subzone and its records, no rights to the parent zone are required.

This prevents the creation of subzones for the zones registered in Yandex Cloud and that users don't have access to.
You can create zones and subzones in different folders. To do this, assign a user or service account the editor role for the folder where the parent zone is located. For more information, see Access management in Cloud DNS.

For instance, the example.com. parent zone is in a folder named my-folder. If you have the rights to manage this zone, you can create subzones such as test.example.com. and production.example.com. in the my-test-folder and my-production-folder folders, respectively.

Public zonesPublic zones

Domain names in public zones are available from the internet. If you have a registered domain, you can delegate it. To do this, specify the addresses of Yandex Cloud name servers in the NS records of your registrar:

• ns1.yandexcloud.net.
• ns2.yandexcloud.net.

If you have already set up domain delegation, delete other NS records.

You cannot create public top-level domain (TLD) zones.

For security reasons, nested public zones can only be created by users and service accounts with the dns.editor, dns.admin, editor, or admin role in the folder where the parent public zone is located. Remember this when organizing the structure of your domain names. For more complex scenarios, contact support.

The service does not require confirmation of domain ownership. You can use a domain zone even though it is not registered to you. If you delegated your domain to Cloud DNS without creating a respective public DNS zone in Cloud DNS, this zone can be used by someone else. Therefore, we recommend that you first create a public DNS zone in Cloud DNS and then delegate your domain.

Requests to public DNS zones and requests for external DNS names from your VMs are public DNS requests. Cloud DNS is used for public DNS requests even if your cloud doesn't contain any DNS zones other than service zones.

We recommend using caching resolvers, such as systemd-resolved, dnsmasq, or unbound. You can use these to reduce the number of public DNS requests, and thereby, your costs.

Private zonesPrivate zones

Domain names from private zones can only be used in the Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) networks specified when creating a zone. Within private zones, you can use the entire namespace in the subnets of the selected network, including internal. and ..

Service zonesService zones

Service zones can be created in VPC networks automatically. A list of these zones depends on the address range of the subnets used. For example:

Service zones Yandex Cloud

• .
• internal.
• 10.in-addr.arpa.
• 168.192.in-addr.arpa.
• 16.172.in-addr.arpa.
• 17.172.in-addr.arpa.
• 18.172.in-addr.arpa.
• 19.172.in-addr.arpa.
• 20.172.in-addr.arpa.
• 21.172.in-addr.arpa.
• 22.172.in-addr.arpa.
• 23.172.in-addr.arpa.
• 24.172.in-addr.arpa.
• 25.172.in-addr.arpa.
• 26.172.in-addr.arpa.
• 27.172.in-addr.arpa.
• 28.172.in-addr.arpa.
• 29.172.in-addr.arpa.
• 30.172.in-addr.arpa.
• 31.172.in-addr.arpa.

These zones contain records with internal FQDNs of VMs and MDB database names, VM user names, and reverse records. You cannot edit records that are created automatically, but you can manage records that are added manually.

For security reasons, it is not allowed to create user records, such as *.yandexcloud.net and *.cloud.yandex.net. To set up easy-to-remember domain names for resources, we recommend registering CNAME or ANAME records in your private DNS zones.

To increase fault tolerance, some traffic may be routed to third-party recursive resolvers. To avoid this, contact support.

Reverse zonesReverse zones

In regular DNS records, a domain name is mapped to an IP address. For example, the ya.ru domain matches the 77.88.55.242 IP address. Reverse DNS resolves IP addresses back to domain names. For example, the 77.88.55.242 IP address will match the ya.ru domain.

Reverse DNS records are placed in special DNS zones that are called ARPA zones. IPv4 and IPv6 blocks reside in separate zones.

You can delegate reverse zone management.