GCP – Introducing managed zone permissions for Cloud DNS

The Cloud DNS team is pleased to announce the Preview launch of managed zone permissions. Cloud DNS is integrated with the Identity and Access Management (IAM) service, which gives you the ability to control access to Cloud DNS resources and prevent unwanted access. This launch enables enterprises with distributed DevOps teams to delegate Cloud DNS managed zone administration to their individual application teams. 

Up until now, Cloud DNS supported resource permissions at the project level only. This allowed for centralized management of IAM permissions at a higher level of granularity. Any user with a specific permission in a project would have that permission apply to all the resources under it. If the project contained multiple managed zones for instance, a single user with project access could make changes to the DNS records in any of the managed zones in that project. This created two challenges for some customers: 

It resulted in the reliance on a centralized team to manage all the DNS zones and record creations. This is usually fine when the deployment sizes are small. However for customers with a large number of managed DNS zones, administration becomes a toil usually borne by the central team.

A single user could modify the DNS records in multiple managed zones, resulting in either broken DNS records or causing security issues. 

With this launch, Cloud DNS will allow access controls at a finer granularity at a managed zone level. This allows admins to delegate responsibilities for managed zone operations to individual application teams and prevents one application team from accidentally changing the DNS records of another application. It also allows for a better security posture because only authorized users will be able to modify managed zones and better supports the principle of least privilege. The launch does not change the IAM roles and permissions; we’ve merely added additional granularity to use when needed. For more details on IAM roles for Cloud DNS, please see Access control with IAM.

This capability also helps when customers are using a Shared VPC environment. A typical Shared VPC setup has service projects that take ownership of a virtual machine (VM) application or services, while the host project takes ownership of the VPC network and network infrastructure. Often, a DNS namespace is created from the VPC network’s namespace to match the service project’s resources. For such a setup, it can be easier to delegate the administration of each service project’s DNS namespace to the administrators of each service project (which are often different departments or businesses). Cross-project binding lets you separate the ownership of the DNS namespace of the service project from the ownership of the DNS namespace of the entire VPC network. This, coupled with managed zone permissions, ensures that the managed zone within the service project can only be administered by service project owners while allowing for the host project (and other service projects) to access the namespace from their respective projects. 

For more details on how to configure and use managed zone permissions, please look at our documentation.