Triton Container Name Service (CNS) is our automated DNS solution for containers and VMs on Triton. Triton CNS serves address records for containers by instance name and by tag. Triton CNS eliminates the frustration of having to update DNS records when you add or remove instances. Using CNS service names, you can get a consistent DNS name for all the instances of a service, even as you scale them up or down or replace them.

Watch our introduction to Triton CNS to learn how easy it is to get started.

Triton CNS is ideal for making applications discoverable on the internet. Get started by adding Triton CNS to your containers with the help of our documentation.

Video transcript

Welcome to this introduction to Triton CNS.

Triton Container Name Service, was designed to do two things:

• Serve address records for instances by instance name
• And serve address records for instances grouped by the CNS service name.

The latter means that multiple instances can share the same DNS name, despite having different IP addresses.

DNS provides a way to assign one or more human friendly names to a long string of numbers, or the IP address, in order to access an instance. DNS names can have more than one IP address assigned to them.

If you've previously managed the process of mapping DNS names to IP addresses, you know what a hassle it can be. With each instance, you have to map your DNS name to the instance IP address. As you scale up the number of instances to meet incoming traffic, you have to go back and map new IPs.

When traffic is exploding because your application has the latest viral image that will "break the internet," you don't want it to actually break the internet. If anything, it will never be more important to be able to scale quickly than in that moment.

When you scale back down after people have moved on, you need to remember which IPs were associated with which instance and remove only the IP addresses of the instances that no longer exist.

For applications built with immutable and disposable infrastructure, each new deploy can change the IP numbers for the running application. Wouldn't it be convenient if there was a way to automatically update DNS for any IP address change?

Triton CNS knows when containers are running. DNS names are automatically updated as containers start and stop so that requests are only sent to running containers.

No matter how many instances exist, when tagged with the same CNS service name, they will be served under the same DNS name.When activated for an account, running instances in Joyent's Triton Cloud with public network interfaces will be automatically assigned DNS names using these FQDN patterns, starting with the instance name or the CNS service name.

All of the DNS names for an instance can be found in the instance details in CloudAPI, easily accessed using the triton instance get command.

Triton Container Name Service is ideal for making applications discoverable on the internet.

With Triton CNS, you can set it and forget it—no longer do you have to stress about updates to your containers taking down web accessibility.

Your applications will be ready for prime time.