The difference between ALIAS and CNAME and when to use them

The chief difference between a CNAME record and an ALIAS record is not in the result—both point to another DNS record—but in how they resolve the target DNS record when queried. As a result of this difference, one is safe to use at the zone apex (for example, naked domain such as example.com), while the other is not.

Let’s start with the CNAME record type. It simply points a DNS name, like www.example.com, at another DNS name, like lb.example.net.  This tells the resolver to look up the answer at the reference name for all DNS types (for example, A, AAAA, MX, NS, SOA, and others). This introduces a performance penalty, since at least one additional DNS lookup must be performed to resolve the target (lb.example.net). In the case of neither record ever having been queried before by your recursive resolver, it’s even more expensive timewise, as the full DNS hierarchy may be traversed for both records:

1. You as the DNS client (or stub resolver) query your recursive resolver for www.example.com.
2. Your recursive resolver queries the root name server for www.example.com.
3. The root name server refers your recursive resolver to the .com Top-Level Domain (TLD) authoritative server.
4. Your recursive resolver queries the .com TLD authoritative server for www.example.com.
5. The .com TLD authoritative server refers your recursive server to the authoritative servers for example.com.
6. Your recursive resolver queries the authoritative servers for www.example.com and receives lb.example.net as the answer.
7. Your recursive resolver caches the answer and returns it to you.
8. You now issue a second query to your recursive resolver for lb.example.net.
9. Your recursive resolver queries the root name server for lb.example.net.
10. The root name server refers your recursive resolver to the .net Top-Level Domain (TLD) authoritative server.
11. Your recursive resolver queries the .net TLD authoritative server for lb.example.net.
12. The .net TLD authoritative server refers your recursive server to the authoritative servers for example.net.
13. Your recursive resolver queries the authoritative servers for lb.example.net and receives an IP address as the answer.
14. Your recursive resolver caches the answer and returns it to you.

Each of these steps consumes at least several milliseconds, often more, depending on network conditions. This can add up to a considerable amount of time that you spend waiting for the final, actionable answer of an IP address.

In the case of an ALIAS record, all the same actions are taken as with the CNAME, except the authoritative server for example.com performs steps six through thirteen for you and returns the final answer as both an IPv4 and IPv6 address. This offers two advantages and one significant drawback:

Advantages

Faster final answer resolution speed

In most cases, the authoritative servers for example.com will have the answer cached and thus can return the answer very quickly.

The alias response will be A and AAAA records. Since an ALIAS record returns the answer that comprises one or more IP addresses, it can be used anywhere an A or AAAA record can be used—including the zone apex. This makes it more flexible than a CNAME, which cannot be used at the zone apex.  The flexibility of the Alias record is needed when your site is posted on some of the most popular CDNs that require the use of CNAME records if you want your users to be able to access it via the naked domain such as example.com.

Disadvantages

Geotargeting information is lost

Since it is the authoritative server for example.com that is issuing the queries for lb.example.net, then any intelligent routing functionality on the lb.example.net record will act upon the location of the authoritative server, not on your location. The EDNS0 edns-client-subnet option does not apply here. This means that you may be potentially mis-routed: for example, if you are in New York and the authoritative server for example.com is in California, then lb.example.com will believe you to be in California and will return an answer that is distinctly sub-optimal for you in New York.  However, if you are using a DNS provider with worldwide pops, then it is likely that the authoritative DNS server will be located in your region, thus mitigating this issue.

One important thing to note is that NS1 collapses CNAME records, provided that they all fall within the NS1 system. NS1’s nameservers are authoritative for both the CNAME and the target record. Collapsing simply means that the NS1 nameserver will return the full chain of records, from CNAME to final answer, in a single response. This eliminates all the additional lookup steps and allows you to use CNAME records, even in a nested configuration, without any performance penalty.

And even better, NS1 supports a unique record type called a Linked Record. This is basically a symbolic link within our platform that acts as an ALIAS record might, except with sub-microsecond resolution speed. To use a Linked Record, simply create the target record as you usually would (it can be of any type) and then create a second record to point to it and select the Linked Record option. Note that Linked Records can cross domain (zone) boundaries and even account boundaries within NS1 and offer a powerful way to organize and optimize your DNS record structure.

CNAME, ALIAS and Linked Record Reference Chart

	CNAME	ALIAS	Linked Record
Use at Apex?	No	Yes	Yes (only to other NS1 zones)
Relative Speed (TTFB)	Fast	Faster	Faster
Collapses Responses	Yes (NS1 Connect exclusive feature)	Yes	Yes

Source: ibm.com

Continue reading

3 reasons why business and data analysts need to work with real-time events

In a research brief defining “5 trends for 2023,” the IBM Institute for Business Value reports, “In 2023, rapid response is the new baseline. Uncertainty is expected and complexity is compounding. As threats materialize on multiple fronts, organizations must reduce the time from insight to action.”

Business and data analysts are intimately familiar with the growing business need for precise, real-time intelligence. They are being increasingly challenged to improve efficiency and cost savings, embrace automation, and engage in data-driven decision making that helps their organization stand out from the competition. To meet these objectives, business and data professionals need to go beyond cookie-cutter business intelligence, data visualization dashboards and data analytics tools. They need to uncover the right digital signals and constantly be aware, so they can detect and respond to critical business scenarios in real-time.

Advantages of event-driven solutions

This is where event-driven solutions excel. Working with “business events” is essential for unlocking real-time insights that enable intelligent decision making and automated responses.

A business event can describe anything that happens which is significant to an enterprise’s operation. A business event is represented by a change in state of the data flowing between your applications, systems and databases and, most importantly, the time it occurred.

Some simple examples of business events include:

• Receiving a new product order
• A decrease in the stock level of a best-selling item
• A new customer support ticket
• A surge in demand levels
• Customer behavior in an e-commerce platform, e.g., placing an item in the checkout cart
• A drop in the pricing of raw materials in your supply chain
• A customer’s social media post about your company

By working directly with streams of business events, users can define critical scenarios, detect them in real-time and respond intelligently. For example, events that describe changes in demand can help make better business decisions on inventory optimization. Events that represent customer satisfaction can drive more proactive responses, quickly turning negative customer experiences into positive ones. Or events identifying repeated component failures in a production line can enable predictive maintenance and earlier resolution of issues to help minimize the costs of rework and downtime.

These advantages are only possible if companies can quickly capture and connect the dots between events in time to impact outcomes and influence KPIs, proactively responding to new opportunities or emerging threats.

3 reasons to take advantage of event-driven solutions

1. They deliver accurate, real-time data you can depend on.

Businesses can’t afford to rely solely on historical data. Streams of business events provide users with a persistent, continuously updated record of their data, as it is being generated. Instead of waiting for data sets to accumulate over time or processing large amounts of data in batches, events provide the ability to perform data analysis in motion. This ensures that key events can be detected and acted upon before their usefulness expires.

IBM worked with Norsk Tipping to build a modern event-driven architecture that accelerated their data processing and delivered more responsive user services. By processing data in motion with IBM Event Automation, Norsk Tipping was able to analyze thousands of transactions from up to a million users at a rate 6x faster than before.

2. They are highly configurable, allowing you to define and detect scenarios unique to your business operations. 

By processing multiple streams of events from different data sources, users can define and detect both simple and complex business scenarios. Joining, aggregating, filtering and transforming streams of events allows users to effectively paint a picture—describing patterns of events that make up a time-sensitive threat or opportunity. IBM has created an intuitive, low code tool designed to empower less technical stakeholders to work with business events and make better decisions, without having to write code or be an expert in SQL. This helps businesses quickly expand into new use cases and derive actionable insights that maximize revenue potential.

3. They go beyond insights, providing key triggers to drive intelligent automation.   

Once users define a critical business situation, they can generate a new stream of events that reports anytime a particular scenario is detected. While this intelligence is already helpful to streamline operations and fuel smarter decisions, organizations can go a step further by activating automation. This could be to trigger process workflows, take decisions based on business rules or prompt digital workers to get more time back for things that matter. Event-driven solutions allow businesses to build more intelligent automations that respond to new trends, customer issues or competitive threats in the moments that matter most.

IBM provides a comprehensive suite of automation capabilities that help you benefit and act on event-driven intelligence. With products such as IBM Business Automation Workflow, IBM Operational Decision Manager and IBM watsonx Orchestrate, there are a wealth of possibilities on your journey to becoming an autonomous and event-driven enterprise.

Source: ibm.com

Continue reading

Responding in real time to changing market dynamics

Keeping up with the volatility of the market is no easy task. When you feel like you understand the changes, you might wake up the next morning to encounter something drastically different. These shifting dynamics bring about unexpected disruptions—like changes in levels of demand—impacting your ability to effectively manage your inventory, satisfy your customer needs, and ultimately your bottom line.

In IDC’s 2022 Global Supply Chain Survey, they identified that “lack of visibility and resiliency to see necessary changes in time to react effectively” was the most problematic and unaddressed deficiency in modern supply chain management and inventory optimization. Changes in customer needs and customer demand are happening as you read this, but lack of visible data might prevent you from realizing these changes in time to act on them.

To stay on top of these frequent changes in demand, it is imperative that organizations evaluate their business model and develop the ability to adapt in real-time. Specifically, organizations that can implement more continuously aware, dynamic, and automated inventory management systems create a significant competitive advantage to increase market share.

Lack of visibility fuels siloed data

Lack of visibility into how changing market conditions interact with your inventory has a clear and distinct impact on your supply chain management. It prevents you from noticing changes in demand across multiple sales channels, and how well your current stock levels and locations are suited to satisfy it. Moreover, it can have a significant effect on your e-commerce models, hindering your ability to stay on top of supply changes and reflecting them in your online inventory.

Supply chain teams often have visibility into global supply chain shifts, but the data is often siloed and inaccessible to other team members. Consider financial analysts and product managers that must keep up with the changes in the price of their raw materials to ensure overall profitability and optimal decision-making. Individuals in these roles often have delayed awareness of changes and have no easy way to evaluate the resulting impact on their margins, whether positive or negative. This creates a domino effect: if your product teams are unable to access this pricing information in real-time, marketing strategy teams might then struggle to provide up-to-date messaging to potential customers.

Even if business teams could access real-time events, little to no training in coding becomes yet another wall to climb in their efforts to perform data analysis. New technologies are constantly emerging, but business team skill levels often lag behind the speed of these changes.

Benefit from events, no matter your role

Instead of waiting for supply chain teams to forward reports with operational data (which often take too long), what if your financial analysts could directly gain insight into what is going on so they can make more immediate operational decisions.

Consider a situation where the price of a material used in production dropped after you closed negotiations with your supplier. You were unaware of this since the supply chain teams only provide this information in quarterly reports. If you had access to real-time pricing data, you could receive immediate notification of drops in prices and take earlier action. For example, you could renegotiate a supply contract to keep business inventory costs low.

With IBM Event Automation, an analyst can use real-time events to identify business situations in a user interface that doesn’t require any coding. This brings operational visibility to the forefront; even line of business teams without a technical background can detect when a business is overpaying for materials used in production. For example, you could build an event-driven flow that detects whenever a supplier’s real-time pricing drops 10% below the price paid.

In addition, teams can perform cost/price analyses in real time, turning these changes into insights. Data that was previously siloed can now be used to optimize the organization’s pricing strategy, improve customer experience and customer satisfaction, and positively impact profit margins.

In an instant, these analysts can have a full picture of what is going on within the organization, something that would not have been possible without simple access to real-time data. It can provide important metrics and customer insights, paint a strong picture of the customer journey, and help analysts stay on top of changing market dynamics, just to name a few possibilities.

Act in the “now economy”

Knowledge is power, but it must be used to your advantage and faster than ever before. Our digitized economy requires speed: leveraging the right information at the right time. The inability to act fast might result in lost revenue, lost opportunities, and damaged customer relationships.

The now economy requires us to be focused on what is going on with our businesses in the present moment. The present moment comes with opportunities, which unfortunately often get lost in the amount of data organizations generate. Unforeseen economic disruptions, shifting market trends, and rapidly changing customer behavior all have the potential to drastically affect your business initiatives—unless you can stay on top of them. In addition, digital transformation initiatives have created the proliferation of applications, creating data siloes.

Our increasingly digitized world has skyrocketed customer expectations; our customers know what they want, and they want it now. To address these expectations, it’s important to put this information in the hands of those who need it, such as market research and data analytics teams, that can leverage data in the moment to build a truly customer-centric organization.

Put automation to work for your business

IBM Event Automation is designed to help organizations and stakeholders become continuously aware by making business events accessible directly to those who need to use it. It can allow you to empower users from all areas of your business to identify and act on situations in the moment, helping them avoid getting lost in algorithms, heavy code, or disparate data sources.

Source: ibm.com

Continue reading

Real-time transaction data analysis with IBM Event Automation

As the pace and volume of digital business continue to increase, organizations are facing mounting pressure to accelerate the speed at which they do business. The ability to quickly respond to shifting customer and market dynamics has become key for contending with today’s growing digital economy.

In a survey run by IDC, a leading provider of global IT research and advice, 43% of technology leaders indicated that they were “planning to deliver innovative digital products and services at a faster pace.”

Real-time intelligence helps improve responsiveness

To accelerate the speed of business, organizations should acquire the ability to access, interpret and act on real-time information about unique situations arising across the entire organization.

In the same survey run by IDC, 36% of IT leaders rated “using technology to achieve real-time decision-making” as critical to business success.

The need to improve real-time decision-making is contributing to a growing demand for event-driven solutions and their ability to help businesses achieve continuous intelligence and situation awareness.

An event-driven architecture focuses on the publication, capture, processing and storage of events. When an application or service performs an action or undergoes a change, it publishes an event—a real-time record of that action or change. Those events can then be consumed and processed to help inform smarter decisions and trigger automations.

Putting business events to work

However, becoming an event-driven business involves more than just collecting events from applications and services. Streams of events need to be processed—by applying operations like filtering, aggregating, transforming or joining with other streams of events—to define a time-sensitive scenario that the business needs to detect.

To show this with an example, consider one stream of business events sourced from an order management system. This stream provides a persistent, real-time log of all orders received. Though this stream of events can be useful on its own, allowing us to detect any time a customer transacts and places an order, we can unlock more value by combining this with other streams of events to define a critical business scenario.

Now, consider processing this stream of events to filter it to new orders that have a value greater than $100 and are placed within 24 hours of a new customer account creation. Now, beyond just the notification of a transaction, we are detecting a key scenario that warrants action from the business—namely, an opportunity to foster new customer growth and loyalty. This was just one example, and business events can be collected from a wide variety of systems, applications, devices and services across an organization. But no matter the source, getting the most value out of events requires that we process and correlate streams of events together to define a business scenario.  

Get started with IBM Event Automation

By putting events to work, companies can help teams proactively respond to key customer opportunities, issues or potential threats as they arise. They can also help quickly adjust to shifting market dynamics and external factors affecting business operations, like changes in levels of demand, costs and more.

And these benefits shouldn’t be available only to highly technical teams. By lowering the skills barrier to processing events, line-of-business teams can be empowered to define and detect time-sensitive situations. This is especially important as companies continue to grapple with the impact of the Great Resignation.

In a survey run by IDC, 45% of IT leaders reported “a general shortage of people with the right skills” as “the main reason vacancies are hard to fill” for their real-time use cases.

IBM Event Automation’s event processing capability is designed to be intuitive and accessible by users across the business. With it, both business and IT teams can start working with events and defining business scenarios without writing code or being an expert in SQL.

Source: ibm.com

Continue reading