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There is still Hesiod support in GlibC / NSS, etc on most modern systems. When put together with Kerberos it's a nice way to provision auth on lots of machines automatically.

It's nice to have a dedicated and restricted resolver config so that the zone visibility can be restricted but that makes deployment a little more complex.

+100 for use Hesiod. It solved this problem well and correctly years ago, and just works. (It was also a key part of the support for Carnegie-Mellon's Andrew networked filesystem.)

The seamless integration of all the Project Athena stuff (Hesiod, Kerberos, etc.) with DEC Ultrix is one of many reasons that Ultrix is still, IMO, the greatest Unix/;Unix-like distro in history.

and of course the venerable NIS / yp lived parallel to DNS in most organizations.