The coming DNS challenge

Om links to a Business 2.0 article on the dangers of a over-worked DNS and how that has resulted in the recent outages at Google and Comcast.  The article and the resultant press coverage on this topic highlights the growing problem with current DNS infrastructure. 

(Warning: tooting Globespan and our portfolio company's horn ;-))

We had invested in Nominum in early 2003 on the investment thesis that open source BIND will not scale and its nice to see that atleast once in a while we are right with our investment thesis.  Nonimum has assembled the world's top experts in DNS (Paul Mockapetris, David Conrad, etc.) and they have built the most scalable DNS engines ever.  If you are a carrier, ISP or an enterprise, you would be doing yourself a disservice by not upgrading your DNS architecture.  If they can't find you, they cannot buy from you.

(end tooting)

Update 1: Good comment by Jeff Nolan on the comcast outage:

that comcast outage wasn't due to overworked DNS but rather a move that the company made to consolidate their regional DNS servers into centralized data centers. Comcast screwed up their network through poor planning, and as evidence to prove my point that this wasn't a DNS scaling issue is that comcast users en masse started moving to Verizon's DNS servers (I did) and they handled the load just fine despite having more broadband customers than Comcast has.

I think there is a fair debate to be had about how to scale DNS, especially when we consider exponential scaling for VoIP to the masses and so on, but the other plane that this debate should reside on is distributed vs. centralized.

I don't know what happenned at Comcast and Jeff is usually right on these kind of things so I am sure it was due to poor planning.  What I do know given our active involvement in Nominum is that the DNS infrastructure is being taxed in numerous ways:

• DDOS attacks are dramaticallly impacting DNS availablity and BIND is not set up to handle that
• Pharming attacks are raising issues of what "DNS addresses" to trust and how to know you really are going to the right address
• Network operations are becoming complex and network operators want to move, centralize and manage their IP addresses and the current bubble gum and wire setup (usually a bunch of excel spreadsheets) don't let them do that.

Given all that, I think more and more enterprises and carriers are going to opt for a commercial DNS solution rather than rely on BIND