Single service comparison

Both services offer public and private zones plus REST APIs, but their data models and control planes differ. GCP Cloud DNS organizes work into managed zones with DNSSEC signing, forwarding zones, and peering zones, managed via gcloud or REST with Cloud IAM and Cloud Logging. Huawei Cloud DNS exposes public zones, private zones associated to one or more VPCs, intelligent resolution lines (geolocation, ISP, custom, weighted), PTR records, and conditional forwarding for hybrid DNS; DNSSEC support is not documented as a first-class managed feature, so signed-zone workloads need verification before migration.

Scaling, HA, and operational telemetry diverge. GCP relies on Google's global anycast and publishes a 100% availability SLA with query logging piped to Cloud Logging and metrics in Cloud Monitoring. Huawei Cloud DNS is deployed in more than 20 regions, claims 100% availability and terabyte-level DDoS protection, and offers flow logs for queries between on-premises, cloud, and Internet resolvers; however, the logging and observability surface is Huawei-native (LTS/TLS) rather than the GCP Cloud Logging model, so dashboards, alerts, and audit pipelines must be rebuilt.

Integrations and governance boundaries differ. GCP private zones bind to VPCs and projects under Cloud IAM, with cross-project sharing and DNS peering. Huawei Cloud DNS binds private zones to VPCs, supports cross-region association and Landing Zone-based cross-account sharing, and integrates with Direct Connect, VPN, ELB, CDN, and ECS for traffic routing. IAM semantics, SCP-style guardrails, and quota limits are not identical, so permissions and per-account zone limits must be re-mapped rather than lifted verbatim.

Start with assessment: enumerate every GCP managed zone (public and private), record sets, routing policies, DNSSEC state, forwarding/peering zones, VPC associations, IAM grants, and query-log sinks. Decide per zone whether Huawei public zones, Huawei private zones associated to VPCs, or a hybrid DNS with conditional forwarding is the correct target; do not assume one type replaces all GCP variants. Confirm record-set and zone quotas in the target Huawei region before planning.

Migrate configuration by exporting each GCP managed zone's record set (zone export or API list) and recreating it in Huawei Cloud DNS through the console, REST API, or Java/Python/Go/.NET SDK. Map GCP routing policies to Huawei intelligent resolution: weighted routing maps to weighted routing lines, geo-routing to geolocation lines, and custom policy needs custom lines. For private zones, replicate VPC associations and configure DNS Resolver conditional forwarding for hybrid on-premises domains; verify DNSSEC separately, since managed signing parity is not documented.

Validate before cutover: pre-lower TTLs on the source zones, recreate NS and SOA targets in Huawei, and test resolution from global recursive resolvers and from within target VPCs. Confirm PTR records, CAA records, and reverse zones for email senders behave identically. Use Huawei flow logs and dual-resolver checks to catch missing records, line-priority misordering, and private-zone override conflicts where public and private zones share names.

Cut over by updating registrar NS delegations to Huawei name servers for public zones, reassigning private zone VPC associations, and re-pointing any forwarding or peering dependencies. Account for cost and quota model changes: GCP bills per managed zone-month plus query volume tiers, while Huawei DNS billing is access-tier based and adjacent resources (VPC, Direct Connect, ELB, CDN) carry their own charges. Rebuild observability, alerting, and audit pipelines against Huawei logging rather than Cloud Logging, and revisit IAM and Landing Zone governance for cross-account private-zone sharing.