Video

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.