05.14.2012 By Kevin Gray
How To Access The API Within DynECT 5.0
Bob Dylan once sang, “The times…they are a’changin‘”. This is true of many things and Dyn is no exception.
If you’ve been a DynECT Managed DNS client the past few years, you may have noticed that your advanced services have changed in the way they are packaged and listed. This is done so that all of the functionality available within our portal is condensed in a more logical and easy to digest format.
For example, what used to be called Round Robin Load Balancing is simply Global Server Load Balancing (GSLB) with every IP address in the global pool as it didn’t make sense for these two services to be shown differently within the portal. Also, Geo Traffic Management and Real Time Traffic Management (RTTM) are now sold in a single package so they are now represented that way in our managed portal.
This logical setup has a bit of a trickle down effect on our API access. Traffic Management now includes the formerly separate Load Balancing, CDN Manager and DTM Traffic Manager services, yet all three services still have separate API documentation. This is done because currently running services, enabled prior to the new service architecture, are still accessed by them.
Read More05.03.2012 By Tom Daly
Recursive DNS, Round Trip Times, Delegations & DNS Performance
Usually on the Dyn blog, you’ll hear us talking about the technology behind our authoritative DNS infrastructure, the benefits of IP anycast routing, the scale of our global infrastructure and more.
Often ignored, but still a major part of the DNS system, is the recursive DNS infrastructure, traditionally deployed by ISPs to serve their customers.
One way to think of the two pieces of the DNS is that the authoritative DNS (ADNS) is the Internet telephone book (a directory of DNS hostnames mapping to IP addresses) and the recursive DNS (RDNS) is like directory assistance, helping you look up an entry in the authoritative DNS.
There are tons of recursive DNS servers all over the world. In fact, on April 1st, 2012, Dyn’s IP anycast network communicated with nearly 3.2MM unique recursive DNS servers around the world. Every ISP in the world runs them for their customers. Enterprises need to run them to support their internal networks and there are third-party DNS options such as Internet Guide running all over the world.
Read More04.11.2012 By Andrew Sullivan
Resolution, Browsers & Hope For The Future
Last September, my colleague Ben Anderson provided a nice illustration of the ways browser caching behavior can be a problem. This is a general issue that has been around for a number of years. Many browsers have wrestled with it repeatedly and the issue doesn’t seem to go away.
However, there seems to be some new interest in tackling this issue and some interested parties gathered just before the IETF meeting at the end of March to discuss it.
Why do browsers care about the DNS at all?
DNS is not something that most people think about when using the Internet. Neither should they have to: the DNS is just part of the infrastructure in the same way that IP addresses are. This is why Dyn works so hard to make our customers’ DNS infrastructure so reliable as the only time a user ought to notice the DNS is when it breaks (and it should never break).
If that’s true, then we ought to expect any Internet client – including web browsers – to use the very same infrastructure as everything else and for the DNS resolution mechanisms to be the ones offered by the operating system. What makes browsers different?
Read More03.26.2012 By Andrew Sullivan
Wither WHOIS!: A New Look At An Old System
No, that title is not a typo. The WHOIS service and the underlying protocol are a relic of another Internet age and need to be replaced.
At the recent ICANN 43 conference in Costa Rica, WHOIS was on just about every meeting agenda because of two reasons. First, the Security and Stability Advisory Committee put out SAC 051 which called for a replacement WHOIS protocol and at ICANN 43, there was a panel discussion on such a replacement. The second reason was the draft report from the WHOIS Policy Review Team.
This is hardly the first time there has been hand-wringing about WHOIS, especially at ICANN. So what’s all the noise about now?
Read More03.23.2012 By Clint Taylor
Managed DNS Leadership & Learning With DynECT 5.0
John F. Kennedy said, “Leadership and learning are indispensable to each other.” At Dyn, being the leader in Managed DNS means a relentless pursuit of constant learning at the highest levels – about our customers, their industries, and pushing the envelope of technology itself. This is epitomized in our recent launch of DynECT 5.0, the newest version of our enterprise product.
With DynECT 5.0, we answered the question, “What gives our customers users the absolute best competitive advantage?” We took time to learn from our customers, took a step back and consolidated our most popular features into a simpler, streamlined interface.
Combined with updates to Geo Traffic Management (GeoTM), the flexibility to monitor CNAMEs and boosted notifications, DynECT 5.0 offers unparalleled value in managed DNS.
So how do we make DynECT even better?
Read More03.21.2012 By Tom Daly
Hello Warsaw! Poland Joins Dyn’s Anycast Network
It’s an exciting day as we continue our worldwide quest to grow our global footprint of IP Anycast Points of Presence (POPs) around the world with the addition of our newest POP located in the capital city of Warsaw, Poland.
As per our Dyn Status post, this POP was injected into our IP Anycast network between 1800 and 2200 UTC today. As a strategic location, we expect Warsaw to reduce DNS latency in the Eastern Europe region and to enhance the level of redundancy we offer to our customers in that region.
Our Warsaw POP has been collocated with the PLIX DC, a carrier-neutral data center located in the downtown of Warsaw. PLIX DC is also home to the Polish Internet Exchange (PLIX), currently Poland’s largest Internet exchange, handling over 200Gb/sec of traffic on a daily basis.
Per usual, we’ve connected the POP to our typical IP transit carriers including NTT America, Tata Communications, Level(3) Communications and Cogent Communications.
Our data center operations team has been working hard to prepare equipment, get it shipped to the site and work with the PLIX DC team to get everything racked, stacked, connected and running. It’s a major accomplishment and we’re excited to see the results of their work turned up today. It’s pretty exciting to see a site go from blue (planned) to orange (active) on our Dyn Anycast Network Map!
What’s next?
With all of the excitement in bringing Warsaw online, we’d be remiss if we didn’t mention all of the other work we’ve been doing to enhance our infrastructure:
- We moved our Tokyo POP to a new data center, Equinix TY2, back in December.
- We moved our Singapore POP to a new data center, Equinix SG1, back in December.
- We’ve started an overhaul of our London POP to refresh and upgrade all of the systems currently serving Western Europe. A refresh and upgrade to our Chicago, IL, POP is also imminent.
- We’re actively pursing the identification, negotiation and turn up of two new POPs: Brazil and India.
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03.13.2012 By Tom Daly
On The Journey For The Perfect Network Health Dashboard
This post was co-authored by Alex Sergeyev from Dyn Labs.
At Dyn, we obsess about network performance and the proof is in the tools we have built over the years to constantly monitor how our network is running. With a globally deployed Anycast DNS network, constant internal and external monitoring of our performance is critical. This constant surveillance of our network ensures that we keep providing top-notch services. One of the biggest challenges is being at the mercy of third party providers and their monitoring platforms when monitoring our Anycast network.
After all, we cannot monitor ourselves and be fully objective with the data.
One of the issues with using external monitoring providers has always been the ability to pull data from the monitoring provider within an acceptable interval. We really want to be seeing data within a few seconds of a test run completing so that we can correct any issue just as soon as it happens. For a long time, we’ve been working with monitoring providers that can get us our data in five or ten minutes at minimum and on a dashboard they render – hardly usable for our operations.
As we’ve mentioned before, one of our favorite monitoring providers is Catchpoint and thanks to their Data Push API, we’re able to receive a constant stream of feedback from their 50 global monitoring nodes in real time. Every five minutes, a Catchpoint node performs a series of tests against our DNS servers and instantaneously relays that information to the central Catchpoint collector, but also ships a copy of the results to a webserver on our network so we can begin reviewing those results immediately.
Enter the challenging part: how do we build a dashboard with ACTIONABLE data with 50 data sources and 4 targets (over 200 data points) over an hour’s time? Enter Alex Sergeyev from our Dyn Labs team, some ZeroMQ love and work with Websockets and D3.js. Alex built us a very slick visualization application that allows us to really see what’s happening in real time.
Read More03.06.2012 By Tom Daly
The Impact Of DNS Round Trips On Website Performance
My latest performance annoyance with DNS is the proliferation of long CNAME chains employed by various service providers around the Internet to topologically geolocate end-users and end-user networks. The concern is that many people don’t understand or appreciate the number of DNS queries that need to be performed due to these long CNAME chains, in many cases each with their own authoritative DNS infrastructures, of which many are not global anycast offerings like DynECT Managed DNS.
We’ve come across many sites where the main zone itself (say “example.com”) is using a robust anycast DNS network, only to CNAME critical web assets (such as www.example.com) off to less robust Unicast networks simply for enhanced performance through the use of Global Server Load Balancing (GSLB).
With the uptake of modular websites having an increasing dependence upon multiple DNS lookups to include and render external content, such as CDN for CSS and Javascript, social network integrations, and commenting systems, end to end DNS performance is becoming an increasingly critical element of page load times.
To back up this claim, we decided to study three popular banking websites, each known to use CNAME chains for the purpose of geolocation. For the sake of comparison, we setup a corresponding DNS hostname which mimicked the exaction geographic behavior of the original website FQDN and ran end to end page load measurements of the six FQDNs. Performance test data was taken from a variety of US locations using Catchpoint Systems monitoring.
Read More02.22.2012 By Alex Lessard
Five Reasons Why Geo Traffic Management Is Your New DNS Best Friend
For years, the name of the game in managed DNS has been speed. Fast and faster are the two settings and just like your old antique 486, why would you ever turn off the turbo button? This mentality has been the bread and butter of Dyn and its DynECT Managed DNS platform.
We have strategically located our data centers and colocated with the best providers to maximize our Anycast network. We’ve iterated over and over again to eek out the best in software, systems and infrastructure. We’ve leveraged the power of DNS to give customers fast and reliable monitoring, effective failover and load balancing and at each step, we’re always paying attention to the effects on latency. And it’s all paid off: we’re fast.
From one globally distributed company to another, “Sometimes speed alone isn’t enough.” With the likes of Traffic Management and Real Time Traffic Management, we’ve already given our customers more control to distribute their traffic regionally and to do it quickly, but what if the structure of the internet doesn’t fit the business’ model, networking limitations, content needs or distribution model?
Here’s five reasons why Geo Traffic Management (GeoTM) is the answer.
Read More02.16.2012 By Kyle York
How We Scope And Price Unique Managed DNS Deals
As our company, corresponding sales team and customer roster continues to grow, we consistently come across more and more unique deals. Our quest for managed DNS industry domination is in full force. In doing so, we follow a shared approach between quality and quantity when it comes to the caliber of client and the number of them we aim to acquire.
Great DNS (inexpensive in the grand scheme of the infrastructure stack) is simply the gateway to the expenses associated with your colocation, bandwidth, monitoring (try Catchpoint), analytics, cloud hosting, CDN (try Fastly), storage, power and cooling costs. But it’s the nature of the app or site and the hosting environment behind the URL can create some pretty funky scopes for our enterprise DNS platform.
With each customer who evaluates our DynECT Managed DNS platform, we learn of new DNS use cases for our services and about the complexities of some companies’ Web infrastructure.
Here are some unnamed examples of interesting client scopes we’ve come across lately.
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