Advantages of A or CNAME dns records?

Is there an advantage to using A or CNAME dns records for custom domains pointing to cloud servers?

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Hey Chris,

Main advantage of CNAME is if IP address changes the mapping is unaffected, whereas if it’s an A record and the IP address changes for the environment the mapping breaks. Other than that no discernible difference.

I believe the best option is to use ANAME record where it’s possible (if your DNS provider supports it). It will give you advantages of the both: unaffected mapping if the IP address changes and you can bind the record to the “naked” domain without www. prefix.

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Ruslan,

Do you mean CNAME or A records?

Jim, I mean ANAME, it’s like a mix of CNAME and A record. More details can be found at the link https://tools.ietf.org/id/draft-ietf-dnsop-aname-01.html.

That is new to me, thanks for the link. Will have to play around with that for my Jelastic environments that have mapped domains

Interesting. It appears that hover, which I use for domains, doesn’t offer ANAME records.

You can change your DNS to Cloudflare and use their service https://blog.cloudflare.com/introducing-cname-flattening-rfc-compliant-cnames-at-a-domains-root/

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