Migrating to cloud computing? Don't forget DNS

The cloud computing model offers the promise of reduced IT operational costs, which may prove appealing in these recessionary times. But before you mothball your data center and start using servers distributed across the 'Net, you need to rethink your DNS infrastructure, experts say.

Dynamic Network Services Inc. -- dubbed Dyn Inc. -- a New Hampshire provider of enterprise and consumer DNS services, is expanding its line of outsourced DNS services to address the many issues that crop up when companies migrate to cloud computing.

Dyn Inc.is adding traffic management features to its Dynect platform for enterprise customers. Starting in January, the platform, used by several hundred companies, will be sold with add-on global load-balancing that allows customers to route traffic geographically to the closest available server to improve the latency of Web applications.

"As cloud computing takes off, I think traffic management is going to be a very big deal for people running dynamic Web apps, especially those using [content delivery networks] like Akamai," says Jeremy Hitchcock, CEO and CFO of Dyn Inc. "CDNs are wonderful for handling small and large file downloads and streaming media. But if you have a database-backed application, it seems hard to make that work with a CDN. So, what a lot of customers prefer to do is grab a Rackspace server in Dallas and a Verio box in Detroit . . . but they have no way to make sure that people get to the application servers that are geographically close to them. . . . They end up with bad, unoptimized Internet routing."

Dynect Traffic Management will provide customers with a network server map that looks like an airline's travel map, Hitchcock says. Customers can use this map to localize their applications and speed up response times for users around the globe.

"What I'm hoping is that Dynect Traffic Management will provide more resilient applications to end users by distributing content and dynamic applications globally," Hitchcock says. "We'll spread these applications out over multiple data centers and get out of engineering around single points of failure. Everything will be distributed everywhere."

Dynect runs on Anycast DNS servers housed in the firm's 10 global data centers. Customers use a SOAP-based API to control their DNS settings via a Web interface. SOAP is the Simple Object Access Protocol, which is used to send short messages over the Internet that can easily pass through firewalls.

With its global load-balancing features, Dynect will let customers quickly reroute DNS services if their cloud computing service suffers an outage or to handle traffic spikes.

"We have some exciting new features: IP load-balancing and other techniques that allow companies to manage traffic on their networks at the DNS layer," says Tom Daly, president and CTO of Dyn Inc. "It's a robust DNS offering that's right up to par with many of the DNS players."

Companies that outsource their DNS services to the service provider handling their Web hosting will wind up in trouble if there's an outage, Daly says. That's because their DNS infrastructure will be down, preventing the company from routing traffic to a backup site.