01
Challenges
Neustar Security Services which offers industry-leading security solutions to 60 of the Fortune 100, wanted to upgrade to a next-gen, scalable, managed Domain Name System (DNS) service with the following objectives:
- Increase domain hosting capacity by 20x
- Improve domain resolution capacity by 10x
- Enhance analytics capabilities to improve customer service
- Ensure protection against Distributed Denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks
- Serve 99.9% DNS server queries in less than a millisecond (excluding network latency)
- Drive double-digit revenue growth
Enabled ~$2 M annual cost savings by reducing Oracle licensing costs
02
Solution
The Impetus team redesigned Neustar Security Services’ existing monolithic system to a scalable microservices-based system on AWS. We identified reusable components from both customer-facing and internal systems and converted them into microservices. In addition, we broke down their vast Oracle database into smaller data stores based on data type and refactored the data using specific microservices.
Highlights
- Created a secure, scalable solution leveraging 25+ AWS offerings including Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), Simple Storage Service (S3), DynamoDB, Virtual Private Cloud (VPC), ElastiCache, Elastic Load Balancing, Auto Scaling Groups, CloudWatch, CloudTrail, CloudFront, and Relationship Database Service (RDS)
- Replaced Oracle-based leaf data nodes with NoSQL-based data nodes to reduce Oracle licensing cost
- Enabled single-click automated deployment of application releases using Jenkins and Terraform
- Scaled from 18 to 64 resolution nodes and enhanced resolution capacity by 10x to manage up to 800 billion queries per day
- Consolidated Top-Level Domain (TLD) and Second-level Domain (SLD) DNS platforms to avoid code base and infrastructure redundancy
- Increased domain hosting capacity from 2.5 to 50 million zones by rearchitecting the data store and implementing hash partitioning
- Developed microservices for auditing operations and storing audit data in Oracle
- Developed reporting APIs and enabled generation of reporting data and storage in Greenplum
Reduced release cycle from 3 days to 15 minutes using CI/CD pipelines
03
Impact
Switching to a scalable microservices based system on AWS enabled Neustar Security Services to reduce annual licensing costs by ~$2 M, and improved reporting and auditing visibility for better decision-making. They were able to increase capacity by 10x to manage up to 800 million queries and host 100 million unique domains. The solution also powered latency of <1 millisecond for 99.95% queries, which enabled them to become one of the world’s fastest DNS servers.
Business Benefits
- Reduced annual licensing costs by ~$2 M
- Increased capacity by 10x to manage up to 800 million queries and host 100 million unique domains
- Powered latency of <1 millisecond for 99.95% queries, enabling Neustar Security Services to become one of the world’s fastest DNS servers
