---
layout: docs
page_title: Consul DNS use cases
description: >-
  Service discovery is one of Consul's foundational capabilities. Consul is platform agnostic, which allows it to discover services across multiple runtimes and cloud providers including VMs, bare-metal, Kubernetes, Nomad, EKS, AKS, ECS, and Lambda.
---

# Consul DNS use cases

@include 'text/descriptions/consul-dns.mdx'

Consul DNS dolves the following primary use cases:

- **Multi-cloud service discovery at scale**: Consul DNS provides a single domain name addresses that works across multi-cloud and hybrid cloud environments where Consul runs. You can scale application workloads using ephemeral services that are always addressable through Consul.
- **Fine-grain DNS options**: You can address a service running in a specific datacenter, admin partition, or namespace. You can also use custom tags to route service requests to specific versions, which can help you with canary and blue-green deployments.

## Consul compared to other DNS tools

**Examples**: NS1, AWS Route53, AzureDNS, Cloudflare DNS

Consul was originally designed as a centralized service registry for any cloud environment that dynamically tracks services as they are added, changed, or removed within a compute infrastructure. Consul maintains a catalog of these registered services and their attributes, such as IP addresses or service name. For more information, refer to [What is Service Discovery?](/consul/docs/use-case/service-discovery).

As a result, Consul can also provide basic DNS functionality, including [lookups, alternate domains, and access controls](/consul/docs/discover/dns). Since Consul is platform agnostic, you can retrieve service information across both cloud and on-premises data centers. Consul does not natively support some advanced DNS capabilities, such as filters or advanced routing logic. However, you can integrate Consul with existing DNS solutions, such as [NS1](https://help.ns1.com/hc/en-us/articles/360039417093-NS1-Consul-Integration-Overview) and [DNSimple](https://blog.dnsimple.com/2022/05/consul-integration/), to support these advanced capabilities. 

