From prototype to mission critical: The evolution of edge architecture at a global DNS service provider

Description

DNS and traffic management service provider NS1’s edge delivery architecture is key to its ability to deliver traffic for many of the largest domains on the internet. From the company’s earliest prototypes in AWS running on a single t1.micro instance to the large, heavily automated, tightly controlled global networks it operates today, NS1’s edge architecture has been in a state of constant flux and growth.

Kristopher Beevers explores the evolution of NS1’s edge as workloads and scale have 10x-ed and 100x-ed and as the company has dealt with issues ranging from global connectivity challenges to complex DDoS attacks to human factors in incident response. The lessons learned aren’t specific to DNS or even edge delivery; they’ll help you decide when to scale vertically instead of horizontally, when to own your infrastructure instead of leveraging cloud services, how to value normalization in your infrastructure, how to automate in response to anomaly conditions, and much more.