I’d like to have an option to temporarily disable individual DNS records, each record could have PAUSE/DISABLE button.
Right now if I have 2-3 A records pointing at different servers and one of them is down for maintenance I have to delete the record until the maintenance is done.
I’d like to have an option to disable one of the records temporarily with a click of a button. It would be even greater if there was API support for it.
One thing you could consider is using a load balancer with a health check - this is how a lot of folks do this type of maintenance activity. When the maintenance starts, the health check you have configured will fail (for example, the server under maintenance could be configured to return a 5XX code) and then the load balancer will stop routing requests to it until it becomes healthy again:
In this way, traffic is routed automatically to only the healthy servers until the maintenance completes.
Load balancer charges for DNS queries, for what I do it’s over my budget.
You could likely accomplish your stated goal without any ongoing charges by using the API to remove and records as needed.
My suggestion is to temporary disable so I wouldn’t need to remove it and add it back. I’m already been removing and adding it back. The case above is one of examples for this suggestion, not the only case.
My point was that temporarily disabling is the same as deleting and adding. If you use the API and Terraform (or similar), you will have your desired outcome without having to wait for a feature that may never come. There is certainly nothing wrong with submitting a feature request. I just wanted to offer an option for a more immediate result.
Then try renaming the record. e.g. location4 becomes location4-disabled-job123
When you’re done, just remove the -disabled-job* part, which is easy for programmatic implementation.