Update/overwrite DNS record Google Cloud

Question

Does anyone know what is a best practice to overwrite records under Google DNS Cloud, using API? https://cloud.google.com/dns/api/v1/changes/create does not help!

I could delete and create, but it is not nice ;) and could cause an outage.

Regards

Answer 1

The Cloud DNS API uses Changes objects to perform the update actions; you can create Changes but you don't ever delete them. In the Cloud DNS API, you never operate directly on the resource record sets. Instead, you create a Changes object with your desired additions and deletions and if that is created successfully, it applies those updates to the specified resource record sets in your managed DNS zone.

It's an unusual mental model, sort of like editing a file by specifying a diff to be applied, or appending to the commit history of a Git repository to change the contents of a file. Still, you can certainly achieve what you want to do using this API, and it is applied atomically at the authoritative servers (although the DNS system as a whole does not really do anything atomically, due to caching, so if you know you will be making changes, reduce your TTLs before you make the changes). The atomicity here is more about the updates themselves: if you have multiple applications making changes to your managed zones, and there are conflicts in changes to the particular record sets, the create operation will fail, and you will have retry the change with modified deletions (rather than having changes be silently overwritten).

Anyhow, what you want to do is to create a Changes object with deletions that specifies the current resource record set, and additions that specifies your desired replacement. This can be rather verbose, especially if you have a domain name with a lot of records of the same type. For example, if you have four A records for mydomain.example (1.1.1.1, 2.2.2.2, 3.3.3.3, and 4.4.4.4) and want to change the 3.3.3.3 address to 5.5.5.5, you need to list all four original A records in deletions and then the new four (1.1.1.1, 2.2.2.2, 4.4.4.4, and 5.5.5.5) in additions.

The Cloud DNS documentation provides example code boilerplate that you can adapt to do what you want: https://cloud.google.com/dns/api/v1/changes/create#examples, you just need to set the deletions and additions for the Changes object you are creating.

Answer 2

I have never used APIs for this purpose, but if you use command line i.e. gcloud to update DNS records, it binds the change in a single transaction and both tasks of deleting the record and adding the updated record are executed as a single transaction. Since transactions are atomic in nature, it shouldn't cause any outage.

Personally, I never witnessed any outage while using gcloud for updating DNS settings for my domain.