[dns-operations] VeriSign talk on Scalability

[Simon Lyall]

Some people might be interested in this from google's recent Conference on
Scalability. I haven't watched it yet since my downloads are a little slow.

Other talks in the conference look interesting as well. BTW: I currently
have a RSS feed for "type:google engEDU" on video.google.com that
tends to find interesting stuff.

Title: Seattle Conference on Scalability: VeriSign's Global DNS Infrastucture

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-5525246919548243924&q=type%3Agoogle+engEDU+dns&pr=goog-sl

Description: Google Tech Talks
June 23, 2007

ABSTRACT

VeriSign's global network of nameservers for the .com and .net
domains sees 500,000 DNS queries per second during its daily
peak, and ten times that or more during attacks. By adding new
servers and bandwidth, we've recently increased capacity to handle
many times that query volume. Name and address changes are
distributed to these nameservers every 15 seconds -- from a
provisioning system that routinely receives one million domain
updates in an hour. In this presentation we describe VeriSign's
production DNS implementation as a context for discussing our
approach to highly scalable, highly reliable architectures. We will
talk about the underlying Advanced Transactional Lookup and
Signaling software, which is used to handle database extraction,
validation, distribution and name resolution. We also will show the
central heads-up display that rolls up statistics reported from each
component in the infrastructure.

Speakers: Patrick Quaid, Scott Courtney
Patrick Quaid is the technical director of Verisign's R&D group,
where he is responsible for design and direction but still manages to
write some code. The R&D group develops VeriSign's high
capacity, highly available infrastructure services, including DNS and
Whois for .com and .net as well as applications providing database,
storage, network and monitoring services. Prior to his current role
he led the development of ATLAS, the framework supporting many
of VeriSign's resolution services.
Prior to that, he participated in the usual assortment of start-ups and
consulting companies. He lives in Northern Virginia with his wife
and three kids.

Scott Courtney is a principal architect in VeriSign's Architecture and
Technology Services group. He leads the Naming and Edge
Services team, where he focuses on systems design for the Shared
Registration System and related resolution services (root, TLDs,
managed DNS). His background at several financial firms and at
one tech startup/shutdown is in highly available systems design,
failure analysis and systems administration ... which often seem
intercorrelated. He received two engineering degrees from Virginia
Tech, and lives in Virginia with his wife and three children.