In recent years, there has been a fundamental shift in how enterprises develop, deploy and deliver applications. Companies are adopting distributed infrastructures using public or private cloud, edge networks, and even multiple clouds and content delivery networks to gain better performance, uptime and efficiency. These gains are often offset by the overhead that comes with managing a diverse and complex mix of infrastructure.
The challenges that emerge from this widespread digital transformation reveal new areas of legacy enterprise technology that are ripe for disruption, such as DDI (DNS, DHCP, and IP address management). And according to analyst firm 451, NS1’s approach is “accelerating digital modernization by unifying the application management stack to deliver all the benefits of internet innovation, simplicity, and automation across even the most diverse enterprise infrastructure environments.”
SourceForge had the opportunity to speak with Jonathan Sullivan, co-founder and chief technology officer for NS1, about the company’s new DDI solution and the trends driving him and his team to innovate in this market.
Q: Can you provide a quick update on how NS1 has been innovating?
A: When we started NS1, we saw the value in making DNS software-defined, automated and consumable across hybrid environments. Most of our competitors were, and still are, networking companies that built products using modified open-source DNS software that’s rock solid and reliable but designed for a different time when infrastructure didn’t change often and, accordingly, neither did DNS. At NS1, we built our software from the ground up, taking an integrated software-defined approach that allows our DNS to be tightly integrated into our customers’ delivery and orchestration stack. What that means is that we’re able to go far beyond “state-of-the-industry” traffic steering options like geotargeting and simple, binary up-down monitoring, and instead use RUM and real-time data streaming from our customers’ infrastructure in order to help them solve complex challenges related to application performance and delivery.
Over the past several years, we’ve seen infrastructure complexity continue to explode, and that’s driving demand for continued innovation deep within the application stack. That’s guided our product road map, and we’ve brought significant innovations to our platform that enable customers to automate application traffic management, applying network telemetry and business logic to achieve the best application performance while optimizing additional critical KPIs like cost and commit management.
Our most recent innovation brings an application-centric approach to DNS, DHCP and IP address management, collectively referred to as DDI technology. These core services are essential to application deployment and delivery. Our new DDI solution makes it easier for DevOps teams to deploy applications into complex infrastructures and helps to ensure those applications perform well once they are in production.
Q: What industry trends led to NS1’s new developments in the DDI market?
A: Application development and delivery have changed. Organizations across all industry verticals are looking to leverage new technologies, vendors and topologies in search of better end-user experience, performance, reliability, security and time to market. For many, this means embracing the benefits of agile development in multi-cloud environments, or building edge networks to optimize delivery while driving cost savings. Others are undergoing significant digital transformation and are overwhelmed by the overhead that comes with managing a complex mix of infrastructure that spans everything from mainframes to microservices. No matter the approach, the goals are the same: delivering high-performing applications that create a competitive advantage.
Infrastructure teams can no longer function as the gatekeepers of change in highly dynamic environments. They need to be enablers of change, giving autonomous application teams the freedom to code, test and deploy when and where they need to, without risk to other IT services. They also need the ability to manage application traffic across diverse infrastructure to ensure the performance and reliability end users demand.
The reason we’re entering the DDI space now is simple: The problems that we’ve solved for the largest companies and enterprises on the internet have appeared on prem in a big way. The incredible resurgence of VMWare along with technologies like OpenStack and Kubernetes have brought the cloud on prem in a very real way. Companies that put off migrating to the cloud either because of timing or security concerns are now able to take advantage of new cloud-like services and frameworks. The modern intranet is looking more and more like the modern internet that’s emerged over the last 5-10 years, and they both share the same needs for load balancing, application traffic management, rapid change propagation, scalability and security. Our software-defined, container-based platform gives us a unique advantage to help solve problems for companies wherever they appear: in the cloud, on prem, or as is often the case, across both.
Q: How is it uniquely solving the challenges you mentioned?
A: What is fundamentally different about our technology, both in SaaS and on-prem form, is that it is built from the ground up to function as a part of your application stack. Our API plugs directly into the tools and technologies that our customers – and potential customers – are already using. Whether an organization is delivering consumer-facing or business applications in the cloud, on prem or in hybrid environments, they can benefit from NS1’s rich traffic management and orchestration features that reduce the friction and complexity of application delivery in rapidly changing enterprise environments. This application-centric approach allows us to meet customers where they are and help them solve problems in new and exciting ways.
Because NS1 is the only provider offering global managed DNS solutions that use the same unified platform as our self-hosted DDI, we’re also able to offer a single management plane that eliminates the need for network teams to jump between different consoles as part of a multi-cloud infrastructure. We’re able to deliver the same features using the same management interface and API experience across internal and external environments.
Q: What is different about NS1 Enterprise DDI? Can you share more about its capabilities?
A: Traditional DDI platforms, first introduced over 15 years ago, were designed to reduce the IT overhead of maintaining highly available and performant DNS and DHCP services. Despite numerous add-ons and enhancements over the years, core DDI technology, the appliance-centric architecture, and the management models have not changed. The only innovation in the space has been to repackage appliances as virtual appliances, but it’s still the same tech that was designed to help network teams manage slow-moving infrastructure. The tech hasn’t kept pace with the needs of application-centric enterprises, and it’s proving to be an active impediment to implementing and scaling critical new technologies like SD-WAN, service mesh and Kubernetes.
This creates challenges for teams delivering dynamic and distributed applications across complex hybrid or multi-cloud environments, edge networks, and microservices platforms. Enterprises are under tremendous pressure to deliver business applications quickly and securely in order to remain competitive, but outdated DDI appliances with complex UIs and workflows, expensive monolithic hardware and software designs, and outdated, poorly performing APIs are getting in the way. Slow, centralized IP management and DNS record changes cause change control bottlenecks that can delay deployments by days or even weeks, impeding DevOps teams and preventing companies from implementing modern continuous integration and delivery (CI/CD) workflows. Development teams cannot afford to be delayed by infrastructure updates and complex management interfaces.
NS1 Enterprise DDI is built on the same software platform that powers NS1 Managed DNS, which is used by the most demanding customers and applications on the internet today. It removes the friction and burden of having to both manage and build apps against a legacy DDI platform, and instead empowers DevOps teams with innovative new functionality that will impact the scale and velocity of application-driven businesses. The platform breaks down application silos to unify service discovery across complex infrastructure and remove roadblocks to workflow automation. Other capabilities and features include:
- Integrated DHCP and IPAM to gain workflow efficiency and visibility across complex, hybrid infrastructure
- World’s most advanced traffic steering technology that automatically routes traffic across your WAN or LANs in order to boost performance while reducing infrastructure costs
- Fast API-first design offers scalable performance for high rates of API calls even in the most demanding automation-driven environments
- Next-generation DNS, with real-time DNS change propagation that delivers service discovery in seconds
- Wide set of integrations, including with Terraform, Ansible, Kubernetes, and numerous TSDBs, for out-of-the-box integration with your tools and vendors.
- Critical security capabilities, including NS1’s implementation of DNSSEC; easy-to-use options for redundant DNS
Q: Can you share more about why traffic management is important to modern application delivery?
A: Performance is inexorably tied to revenue, both in terms of user experience and operational velocity. Companies running complex environments have infrastructure that is dynamic and continuously in flux, and tools that control application traffic and workload have become critical levers for managing this infrastructure complexity, velocity and cost while ensuring optimal performance for end users.
As an example, companies will often extend parts of on-prem services and applications into the cloud so that they have some “burstability.” We can help to automate this process by sending a percentage of traffic to colocated environments where the cost metrics work best or so that applications continue to perform optimally based on real-time network latency measurements. Because our platform integrates with your hardware and application delivery controllers, when our system detects an increase in traffic, it can automatically shed additional load to your cloud environment based on parameters you define. As the event subsides, traffic is smoothly and automatically directed back to your colocated environment.
Traditional DDI platforms are focused on the management of device/service names and addresses but provide very little capability to steer application traffic in order to meet performance and business policy objectives. Because these legacy DDI platforms were built before APIs were considered a best practice, they often perform poorly, and some features simply aren’t addressable via API. This presents a real challenge when it comes to deploying and managing environments where applications are deployed across multiple cloud providers or across a mix of infrastructure that has different capabilities and capacity constraints. NS1’s Enterprise DDI is application-centric, so not only does it provide key traffic orchestration features, it integrates seamlessly into complex, dynamic infrastructure.
Q: What related trends do you anticipate we will see over the next few years?
A: Infrastructure will continue to grow in complexity as more organizations embrace new approaches in search of performance. Applications will continue to become more distributed as infrastructure evolves to become more of a continuum in which both external and internal applications span environments across company-owned hardware, colocated data centers, public and private clouds, serverless functions and yet-to-be-standardized edge/edge-as-a-service platforms. Not only will applications “live” in more places geographically, but they will live in more platforms, and that will increase the requirement for application-centric tools and solutions across the stack.
With the explosion in optionality for where your application (or parts of it) lives, organizations will find a greater need for independent providers of DDI and application traffic management solutions that can more easily integrate across platforms. This will also be a key driver in the establishment of traffic management as a discipline. More organizations will hire specialists and even build entire teams to manage this important function. These teams will be devoted to evaluating traffic patterns and network conditions in order to better utilize traffic steering tools like advanced DNS to control traffic between infrastructure, applications, services and the end user. The goal, as always, will be to improve the end-user experience while ensuring resiliency and security, and improving time to market with new features and functionality.