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December, 2015
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  • 2015 in Review with Jason Silverstein

    December 17, 2015

    Roadmap

     1

    Views: 3760

    2015 was a big year for Enom and the domain industry as a whole. Between the rapidly growing domain name space, the launch of huge new domain extensions, new friends and partners, updated tools andservices, and big improvements to our infrastructure, we’ve hardly had the chance to catch our breath and take in everything that’s happened. As the year closes, we wanted to reflect on 2015 and look forward to what the new year has in store. To get a better handle on all this year’s developments, we sat down with Jason Silverstein, VP, Product & Engineering, himself a new addition to the company in 2015. What we found is that for all the progress we’ve made in products, tech, and services, some of the most exciting things at Enom were, and continue to be, the people that work so hard to support our partners and resellers.


    When you first came to the company [in July], what was your vision for the direction that we’d be taking? And do you think we’re on track to meet it?

    Well, when I got here, the first step was just to assess what was happening in both the domain name space and the company. We wanted to figure out where the industry was, where Enom was, and find a beneficial intersection of the two. To that point, what we found is that we’re doing a great job in some areas and we can do a better job in other areas. As an example of that, we’ve continued to have great relationships with many of our partners and our resellers by ensuring that our services are stable, by being available for support, and offering valuable products and domain extensions. On these fronts we’ve been very successful. Where we’d like to improve even more is helping new customers or those with less experience in the industry to learn the business and learn how to better service their own customers. So we’ve spent the better half of the year engaging our customer support team and developing the front-end of our website to put people in the right place to get the help they need. A lot of 2016 is going to be focused on making it simpler to interact with us, and making it easier to understand what it is we can provide. We want to be in a position where we aren’t necessarily solving every problem up front, but instead understanding the problem and empowering customers to help themselves.

    Tech companies are always innovating and changing the way they approach their business, but what changes has Enom made in 2015 that you’re most proud of?

    We’ve done significant backend work that customers won’t necessarily see, but they’ll feel it. There are services that are getting faster, there are user interfaces that are cleaner, and we’ve removed many of the obstacles to using it all. We don’t always talk about them in the same way we do a brand new product, but these things behind the scenes are important technologically, and set us up for big things in 2016.

    You’re referring to the recent DNS improvements?

    Yes, definitely. DNS is part of it, but also, architecturally, how we think about our work with the registries, and how we think about our own products is very important going forward. So in 2016, for instance, we’re going to put a lot of focus on our API. It’s kind of a generic statement, as there are multiple APIs that developers work with, but one interface to call in to. In any case, we’re improving the speed, certainly, but there are also some pretty cool things coming out of our engineering group that will vastly improve the experience. Resellers using our API to do more bulk checks of domains will be getting a lot more to work with.

    Enom has a really diverse mix of partners, resellers, and customers, each with different needs. How are we positioning ourselves to better support them?

    The answer here is really twofold. First is allowing those with more expertise to be more self-sufficient. We want to provide them the right tools, commands, and reporting in our APIs so that they can do what they need to do, how and when they want to do it. On the opposite end, for our newer partners, we want to guide them more carefully along the process. The easiest analogy is the setup wizard mentality of software. In the same way that TurboTax asks you a couple of questions up front, then customizes and details each step of the process, that’s the level of service we want to offer. We believe that there are huge opportunities not just for Enom, but for the entire industry to simplify what it is that we do. We hope to offer ways to get consumers and businesses not only more excited about purchasing domains, but also to use domains more effectively.

    What are some of the resources that you’re most excited about leveraging going into the new year?

    You know, in my entire career, I have not been more excited about hiring talented people and putting them in the right place with other talented people to do incredible work. With the technology itself changing so fast, bringing new perspectives in and merging them with our existing teams is really important. Those are the things that I’m actually most excited about in 2016. I think the people we have and are bringing in may be more exciting than any product release coming out.

    Can you tell us about some of these hires?

    I’ve got to give Taryn [Naidu, CEO] a lot of credit for this, but he asked me, “How does your team need to be structured to accomplish the goals that you set forth?” And I said that I’d like to bring in a director of engineering, a director of product, a director of tech operations, and a true technical product manager on our API. He agreed to all of it.

    And it meant that we were able to go out and find a new Director of Engineering, Charlie Cheng, from Google, who has a lot of experience in cloud computing and can also help us understand how people use various remote procedure calls into complex infrastructures. He brings a perspective we have not had recently, specific to a business-to-consumer type of environment but in an enterprise environment. We already have the business-to-business side expertise, we understand that, but marrying the two mindsets is a very exciting prospect.

    charlie_headshot

    Charlie Cheng

    We’re also bringing in Director of Product, Ray Winninger, who’s coming to us from HTC, but has also coached startup companies and ran Product Management in the Internet Explorer group at Microsoft for a while. He has this very diverse experience to add to a company like Enom which has multiple constituents. He understands that what may be the most vocal customer isn’t the only customer you need to pay attention to. He gets the idea of consumers, businesses, and governing bodies all wanting to use a product for very different reasons.

    Ray Winninger

    Ray Winninger

    Our new Director of Technical Operations, Glen Mills, is coming to us by way of Expedia and Amazon, and has expertise in continuous integration and deployment, and the test and deployment of large-scale implementations. He’s bringing in a discipline that will really allow us take it to the next level working directly with our data centers and cloud instances.

    Glen Mills

    Glen Mills

    And finally we have a new Principal Product Manager, Michael Fountain, recently from Odin. He was an early API integrator and reseller, so he’s going to be able to focus on what customers and integrators really need from our API team. We want to be better about anticipating what improvements our partners want, and his experiences will really help us prioritize those changes.

    Michael Fountain

    Michael Fountain

    These hires are really a credit to our recruiting team, internal product and engineering teams, HR department, and Taryn. Stability has been our main selling point for certain resellers. To others, it’s our ability to integrate with registries. And to others, it’s that we’re responsive and supportive. So this new team, with its diverse background, is really going to help us stay on top of all of these facets. Some of us have been around for awhile, and others are bringing new perspectives. We’ve got these two A-teams coming together to form a major league team.

    Looking ahead to 2016 and beyond, what trends do you foresee having a big impact on the industry and how does Enom fit into that?

    There’s a huge opportunity out there for branded engagement and branded navigation within the web. What we understand is that it’s very difficult to navigate to very specific destinations online without having some tool to make getting there easier. People aren’t memorizing long domains; they’re either tapping on a button, using link shorteners, or, internationally, using QR codes more often. What’s so exciting for our industry is that new domain extensions can act as link shorteners in a lot of ways. You can use a .SOCIAL to go to your Twitter page, and a .VIDEO to go to your Youtube account, and .NEWS to share your recent updates. For a media company, that’s a phenomenal opportunity to brand, just like the Los Angeles Times did with LATimes.social, and LATimes.news, and LATimes.video. Each goes to a unique destination, but does so with consistent marketing and branding. Companies that are trying to reach different audiences, for different uses, at different times, no longer have to use long URL strings and hope to be effective.

    I think we are uniquely positioned on the reseller side to make this case for branded navigation. As Enom, we have an opportunity to make small changes for those customers that have a big impact down the line. It’s absolutely important for us to help individuals, but by working with resellers to offer these solutions to their own diverse mix of customers, we can produce a network effect that many other organizations just can’t.

    Is there anything else you’d like to communicate to our partners and resellers?

    If there’s something that we’re doing that’s helpful, let us know. If there’s something we’re doing that’s not as helpful, let us know. We are listening. We have a fantastic account management team, customer support team, and product team. Every email is read, every tweet is read. We enjoy helping you help your customers. It’s what we love doing.

    I can feel momentum in the industry. I can feel it preparing for a lot of positive movement and a lot of positive attention around the adoption of new domain extensions. And I feel the momentum within Enom. This past year, we have set ourselves up to take advantage of the technical changes that are coming. But trying to predict what happens technologically more than a year out is often an exercise in futility. That’s why I’m so pumped to have hired the right people and partnered them with those we already have on board. It means we’ll be able to move and adapt quickly in 2016, which is why I can’t wait to see what the new year brings.


    If you’d like to take Jason up on his offer and leave us some feedback, or have any questions about Enom’s direction going into the new year, contact our sales team today.

    Read More

  • Our New DNS: Under the Hood

    December 9, 2015

    DNS, News

     1

    Views: 4935

    At Enom, we know that every DNS performance issue we can solve proactively saves you from countless support headaches down the line. Striving to ensure that it “just works” is a given, but we’re also constantly searching for ways to go above and beyond, pushing the bounds of what’s possible on a global scale. Every facet of our operation is dedicated to that cause, and we’ve been working hard on some major changes to our DNS to deliver on it. This is why we wanted to peel back the curtain a bit, talk with some of the experts close to these changes, and give you an idea of what it all means for you.

    Three billion DNS queries. That’s what Enom’s platform handles every day to service our customers. In some ways, it’s a daunting number that reinforces how many portfolio owners, resellers, and end users rely on our DNS, but it also presents an opportunity. That’s because each improvement made to the system sends ripples through every level of the experience. Thanks to the Rightside and Enom engineering team, we are now happy to introduce our new DNS platform, one that is faster, more reliable, and scalable to your growing needs.

    We’ve undertaken this massive overhaul because those three billion DNS queries will only continue to grow. In addition to total volume, the standards and requirements for DNS have changed dramatically since our last upgrade. Yet, if we’ve done our job, most won’t realize a change even occurred. “The new DNS infrastructure will go largely unnoticed,” says Rightside CTO Wayne MacLaurin. “Infrastructure is like plumbing; nobody really notices it unless it breaks.”

    New platform

    The new DNS platform, which has been live since November, is based on BIND, one of the most widely used, open-source implementations. The decision to change from a PowerDNS infrastructure to BIND 9.10 came about due to a confluence of factors: aging hardware, rapidly expanding data volume, a need for more standardized, secure solutions, and the constant pursuit of general performance improvements. Newer servers optimized for BIND were the antidote to a highly customized, and increasingly unwieldy architecture.

    “The previous infrastructure relied heavily on MS SQL and replication to distribute data to our various DNS PoPs,” MacLaurin says. “It also had a large amount of programmatic logic built into the DNS software itself to handle various customized features. As time passed and DNS query volumes increased, the infrastructure started showing its age. It was hard to update, hard to debug, and it could only handle a fifth of the volume of our new modern DNS server.”

    Additionally, Enom’s servers now employ Kafka to provide high-throughput messaging between our central system and distributed DNS nodes. A series of complex transformations handle the translation of older data into standard DNS types, managing the emulation of non-standard features such as CNAME at apex. To improve monitoring, an ELK (Elasticsearch, Logstash, Kibana) stack now manages statistics gathering and logging.

    What’s different?

    Again, many of the changes may go unnoticed, but the actual differences are remarkable for those with a keen eye for DNS performance. In addition to the new architecture, Enom made significant investments into SSD-based storage, which were then deployed throughout our production environments. Together, software and hardware greatly reduced response times, with updates (such as host changes) now being delivered to the world in under 3 seconds. The everyday end user may not be aware of these faster response times, but cumulatively, this equates to vastly improved interactions.

    “CNAME at apex is possibly the most significant change,” says Ron West, a Senior Software Architect at Enom. Currently, Enom’s DNS answers with what’s known as a CNAME record at the apex of a zone. “This isn’t allowed in DNS, and has undefined behavior to end users. It often works, but sometimes fails badly.” Standard DNS software doesn’t support these records creating uncertainty as to how they would behave in the wild. A workaround was deployed to eliminate that uncertainty.

    “We now take the target of the CNAME record, look up the records it points to, and add them to our own DNS instead of the CNAME record. These look-ups are refreshed continuously, and allow all affected domains to keep working.” These previously undefined behaviors—affecting more than 65,000 domains in Enom’s system—represented many headaches for support at the reseller level, an effort that is no longer necessary thanks to these new enhancements.

    The new DNS also supports deletion holds to benefit customers moving their domains to another registrar or DNS host. “Instead of suddenly refusing to answer queries, or answering with parking,” West says, “we can now facilitate transitions by continuing to answer with the last known DNS records for 4 days. After deletion, we either decline to answer queries (if no longer aimed at our nameservers) or answer with parking.”

    The only exception is multiply hosted domains (multiple DomainNameIDs with the same domain name) where deletion is immediate, leading to the next-highest-priority domain’s records being activated immediately.

    Philosophy shift

    Ultimately, all these changes have come about due to a philosophy of looking creatively at different technologies to solve challenges more quickly than traditional approaches. “Doing so is crucial because the requirements and limitations of one registry aren’t necessarily the same as another,” MacLaurin says. “It’s something that we embrace wholeheartedly, especially if we can reduce complexity, improve reliability, and move faster.”

    The change to Enom’s DNS infrastructure is just one step in a continuous improvement process. “We try not to make technology choices the limiting factor in designing great product architectures. For instance, Kafka was used heavily in the DNS project, but we are also looking at RabbitMQ because each messaging platform has different strengths and weaknesses, depending on the engineering requirements. Elasticsearch is only one of the technologies we are looking at to redefine how we manage our data.”

    Looking ahead

    The DNS improvement project isn’t just a way to squeeze more speed out of the system; it’s an outcome of our goals in using technology to advance the domain name industry and make it easier and less complex to manage for you and your customers. The standards-based nature of BIND, for instance, means we will be able to protect our users better by pushing ahead with support for DNSSEC and other new extensions such as DANE.

    System-wide stability and security are also always in mind. DDOS mitigation is now a major component of any modern DNS infrastructure both in terms of the scale of DDOS we see, but also in how we handle and mitigate DDOS in general. We want to reduce or eliminate every instance of downtime that we can for you and your users, and won’t stop until we have.

    “Nobody really notices DNS unless it breaks.” It highlights the reactive nature of most DNS support efforts. But it’s also why our engineering team has bucked the trend by taking a creative, proactive approach to fixing major DNS issues, some of which are only just now on the others’ radars. We’re always busy applying modern technology solutions to an aging global network. It’s the only way to ensure that our industry keeps prospering, and we are thrilled to keep you updated about all the exciting innovations we’re developing (and surprising things we’re learning) as the Internet continues to grow and adapt.

    If you’d like to learn more about DNS, check out this article from ICANN.

    Read More

  • We’re Spreading Holiday Cheer with these New Product Enhancements

    December 9, 2015

    News

     1

    Views: 3216

    The holidays are upon us! We’ve decorated the office, wore ugly Christmas sweaters to work, and now we’re sending a sleigh full of holiday cheer your way, as we’ve just recently released some big enhancements that will benefit you:

    • Built a new DNS platform. This new platform is based on BIND, one of the most widely used, open-source implementations. It’s faster, more reliable, and scalable to your growing needs. Learn more →
    • Added GeoTrust RapidSSL Wildcard to our security product offerings. RapidSSL Wildcard protects all of your customers’ subdomains with a single, affordable certificate. Learn more →
    • Added the ability to purchase Whois ID protect with a domain name via one API command. This new feature saves you from having to make two API calls (Purchase command to create the domain and then PurchaseServices to create the ID protect). To take advantage of this new feature, just pass “service=wpps” in your Purchase command call. View the documentation →
    • Lifted restrictions from the .PRO domain extension. Afilias, the registry that owns and operates .PRO, has opened up .PRO registrations to everyone.
    • Launched 2 new domain extensions on our platform. We added .NGO and .ONG to our domain extension offerings.

    Read More

  • Now Available: the GeoTrust RapidSSL Wildcard Certificate

    December 8, 2015

    News, SSL

     1

    Views: 3647

    We’re always looking to provide our resellers with a variety of product options to offer their customers, and recently one service has been consistently requested when it comes to security: the GeoTrust RapidSSL Wildcard certificate by Symantec. We are now happy to offer RapidSSL Wildcard alongside the rest of Enom’s SSL certificate portfolio.

    RapidSSL Wildcard protects all of your customers’ subdomains with a single, affordable certificate. It includes unlimited server licenses at no extra cost, issuing DV certificates almost immediately and installing in seconds. Your customers will be able to enjoy the protection of a trusted brand at an ideal price point.

    We know customers are already asking for RapidSSL Wildcard, and it should be a strong selling point for any of your value-minded users with entry-level needs for security. Its price makes it ideally suited to include as part of a bundle of services for your customers. To learn more about RapidSSL Wildcard and our entire lineup of SSL certs, browse our documentation site or contact our sales team.

    RapidSSL Wildcard Features:

    • Industry-standard Wildcard SSL 128/256-bit encryption
    • Security for multiple subdomains on any single domain
    • Support for more than 99% of web browsers and mobile devices
    • Immediate issuance and installation in seconds
    • Free, unlimited reissue 24/7
    • Dynamic RapidSSL site seal
    • Install on an unlimited number of servers

    View the API Quick Start Guide

    Read More

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