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Building the infrastructure of tomorrow

Discussion in 'Nominet General Information' started by Acorn Newsbot, Feb 16, 2021.

  1. Acorn Newsbot

    Acorn Newsbot Junior Member

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    Last week we announced we are committing £20 million to upgrade all of our critical services, focusing on improvements to the .UK name space that will ensure a resilient, reliable and secure future in an increasingly complex digital landscape.

    Technology has changed significantly over the last decade; our last infrastructure upgrade was focused on moving from predominantly on-premise systems, located at our Head Quarters, to our own private cloud hosted in secure third-party datacentres. This time our focus is on adopting a hybrid cloud platform to allow us to migrate seamlessly to public cloud infrastructure, reduce our dependency on our own physical hardware and take advantage of the endless computer capacity and resilience provided by the cloud. This is critical given our significant growth over the last decade.

    As of today, the .UK register is made up of 10 million domains in addition to the 75 top-level domains that we operate. Nominet’s registry system that supports these domains is made up of 12 million lines of code contained in 81 unique applications. These applications run across 190 virtual servers made up of over 600 physical CPU cores, over 300 TB of storage and over 8TB of memory. This infrastructure is required to support the 100,000 plus daily users that we have across our applications and servers that generate over 25 million requests to our registry database per day. These critical applications have maintained an uptime of over 99.9%.

    The infrastructure to support our registry platform is in addition to our global DNS infrastructure, which in December 2020 received over 300 billion DNS queries and maintained 100% availability. A majority of these DNS queries, over 240 billion, were directed to .UK domains. In the last three years this has grown by 68%.

    Our Technology Transformation Programme (TTP), aims to modernise Nominet’s core infrastructure that underlies all of our key registry systems. This will involve expanding our datacentre footprint and provisioning new more capable hardware and software across all our datacentres. By doing so, we will increase the security, stability and resilience of our services in line with the ever growing demands of operating Critical National Infrastructure (CNI).

    Anyone who works in the IT sector will be familiar with the many-faceted challenges of upgrading infrastructure whilst maintaining service up-time. Whilst we continually invest in our technology platform, there comes a time when the physical hardware needs to be upgraded, just as we upgrade our laptops and phones every few years. Nominet last did a complete stack refresh back in 2011, putting in place a platform that has provided a 10-year lifetime. This investment has severed us well, but we are now looking ahead to the next ten years.

    Nominet is very proud to be part of the UK’s Critical National Infrastructure (CNI). However, this isn’t merely a label that we can display on our website. The responsibility of running CNI comes at a cost. The demands of running our infrastructure to the high standards required by our stakeholders, and mandated in law by regulation, means that we need to build security and resilience into the fabric of our platform. The security threat landscape, like the wider technology landscape, is evolving at pace and this requires our engineers to constantly re-evaluate and sometimes even re-design core elements of our platform.

    This essential work, improving how our core systems are architected, protects Nominet and all the users of the .UK name space against ever more frequent and complex threats. In most cases, these changes are completely invisible to our users, just the way it should be.

    It’s an important programme, and a significant investment, that underlines our commitment to future proofing Nominet’s infrastructure for all those who depend on it.

    The post Building the infrastructure of tomorrow appeared first on Nominet.

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  2. Domain Forum

    Acorn Domains Elite Member

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    IWA Meetup
     
  3. monaghan United Kingdom

    monaghan Well-Known Member

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    Am I reading this right, to reduce the dependancy on their own hardware and move to a public cloud they are wanting to increase their hardware and datacentre capacity?
     
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  4. armistice

    armistice Active Member

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    Freudian slip?
     
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  5. ukbackorder

    ukbackorder Active Member ukbackorder.com
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    and yet they can't stop a handful of people exploiting the flaws in their EPP/registry database :p
    Maybe they need to spend another 20 million. It does seem they're getting a bit desperate to try and justify their incompetence and parasitic nature.
     
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  6. webber

    webber Active Member

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    Shouldn't the board refrain from signing any major contracts while their good faith is being challenged?
     
  7. Paullas

    Paullas Super Moderator Staff Member

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    Maybe invest the 20 million to the top 10 drop catchers who know Nominet more than them and more :)
     
  8. Ben Thomas

    Ben Thomas Well-Known Member

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    They probably should, but perhaps they want to push things through quickly in case they're stopped.
     
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  9. aZooZa

    aZooZa Well-Known Member

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    Sometimes I think they make a mountain out of a molehill when they talk about infrastructure requirements to run a registry.
     
  10. DJ

    DJ Well-Known Member

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    Lucrative contracts for mates with nice backhanders. Sounds like something Dominic Cummings would be interested in.
     
  11. webber

    webber Active Member

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    We shouldn't jump to conclusions, but it's definitely something the new board should have a very close look at and, if anything suspicious, to pull the brakes on; assuming the contract wouldn't have been implemented by then, even though it might be signed.