The DDI Universe

When I heard about the recent launch of a Universal DDI product offering, I was dismayed if not downtrodden. Someone’s finally done it, I thought. They built a DDI product that talks to any and all DNS and DHCP platforms, not to mention other DDI vendor products. Even in this time of deteriorating decorum and inflated claims, no one would claim to support the universe of DDI systems without being well, universal, would they?

Relatively Universal DDI

Upon investigating in more detail, however, I quickly realized that perhaps marketing decorum has likewise devolved into outright hyperbole. Sure, the Universal DDI cloud portal added support for both cloud systems and premises based DHCP and DNS, rectifying a prior limitation within their cloud service to unify these previously disparate domains. However, they are only unified from the cloud portal interface, necessitating cloud-only, not premises-based, DDI management. Nevertheless, unified cloud and non-cloud DDI is a solid capability to be expected when managing the DDI universe.

Another capability one would expect within universal DDI is the centralized management of native DHCP and DNS platforms such as stock ISC DHCP, Kea and BIND DNS services, among others. After all, the universe is comprised of several DHCP/DNS vendors. These are not supported today but are promised as a future feature. Beyond platform versatility and multi-vendor support, functional universality would imply complete feature coverage from the logical IP address management foundation, including IPv4/IPv6 integration, to DHCP/DNS manageability across deployment models and cloud services.

Grades of DDI Universality

Certainly, there are shortcomings with every product, ours included, and we fully appreciate marketing license, though we don’t embrace the hubris to proclaim our solution universal. But in many ways, our solution is actually “more universal” than Universal DDI. Cygna DDI products are deployable in the cloud and on-premises and support logical holistic management of IPv4 and IPv6 space deployed across enterprise LAN/WAN/SDWAN/SASE and multiple clouds. We support native ISC DHCP, Kea and BIND DNS, as well as Microsoft DHCP and DNS services (without the added appliance and license cost), in addition to our hardware and virtualized appliances. We also support resource record synchronization for any DNS service via DNS updates and zone transfers; talk about universal!

Our solutions support management of cloud DNS services including Amazon Route 53, Azure DNS, and Google DNS, as well as DDI services deployed in your virtual private clouds in AWS, Azure, GCP and Oracle Cloud. If you prefer the all-cloud subscription approach, our solutions also support instantiation in public clouds with subscription-based pricing, supported by our managed DDI services to essentially provide a DDI as a service model in a multi-cloud environment.

In summary, while universal DDI sounds like the answer to all your DDI problems, the reality is that while this is a solid product offering, it is far from universal and lacks many of the features of competitive DDI solutions, including those from Cygna Labs.