seatwave & tagman talk dyn managed dns

Case Study: Premium DNS@DynInc @TagMan @SeatWave

A Case Study: Premium DNS


Today’s Presenters

Ave Wrigley - Chief Technical Officer, TagMan@Ave_Wrigley | @TagMan

Perry Dyball - Ecommerce Operations Manager – Seatwave@Seatwave

Dave Lemaire – VP, Engineering - Dyn@Bigg33k

mailto:[email protected]

Private and confidential, copyright TagMan 2013

• Who is TagMan and what do we do?

• Performance challenges

• Dyn Geo load balancing and RTTM

• How did we measure success?

Summary

Private and confidential, copyright TagMan 2013Private and confidential, copyright TagMan 2013

1.7 billion tag scenarios

What is Tag Management?


What is Tag Management?

Replace them with just one…

Remove all the tags from client site...

House them in a single system under client control…


TagMan - Solutions

Data Management

Tracking Attribution Privacy Management

STREAM Partner

Program

The Tag Library

Monitoring and Controls

Site Data and Event Tracking

Mobile App Tracking

Campaign Tracking

Real-Time Attribution

Visual Insights Suite (VIS)

Data Gateway

TagMan Opt-out Control

Vendor Opt-Out Control

Evidon powered

notification and vendor opt-out


• Static content from CDN• Akamai / EdgeCast

• Dynamic content from SoftLayer• Conditional tags, tracking calls, data

collection• 30 web heads in 4 POPs (Amsterdam,

Washington, San Jose, Singapore)

TagMan - Architecture


• High performance / high availability• Client website performance

• Fully asynchronous solution

• Data collection• Click / impression tracking• Conversion tracking & attribution

• <300ms response time• Traffic

• CDN – 1.3B requests / month• Dynamic - 5B requests / month

Performance Challenges


Fast response + asynchronous tag delivery


• Performance• Speed of response for DNS lookup• Drive the "fastest response" from CDN /

datacenters

• Arbiter in our multi-CDN strategy• EdgeCast & Akamai

• RTTM failover• Mitigates single points of failure• Spreads traffic based on healthy criteria• Monitoring & alerting using real requests• Immediate rebalance on failure & automatic

recovery

Dyn Geo Load Balancing & RTTM


• Testing CDN requests with Catchpoint & Keynote• avoid single point of testing• External testing services tied to datacentres - which

might be the same as CDN provider• Testing done prior to multi-CDN deployment

• Weighted metrics across several providers• Based on target behaviour

• Tested requests for 4 days to forecast different traffic conditions

• Results• 10ms difference overall (DNS & RTTM)

How did we measure success?


• Testing of dynamic content• Response to poor performance /

failure• CDN arbitration

Further testing

What was the reason for contacting us?Agenda

• Who is Seatwave?

• Why DNS is important to Seatwave

• Why did we change provision to Dyn?

• Basic architecture of the solution

• How we migrated our DNS

• On going DNS management

• Future steps

What was the reason for contacting us?Who we are…

What was the reason for contacting us?Who we are…

• Seatwave is one of Europe's leading Ticket Marketplaces

• Seatwave has over 6 million concert, theatre and sporting event tickets for sale at any one time across 12 country specific sites covering Europe and North America

• Seatwave is the ticket site of choice for over 2 million users per month

• Seatwave customers can purchase from us with absolute confidence with our TicketIntegrity™ guarantee

• Seatwave provides a platform for content owners, affiliate sites & app developers to promote their tickets

What was the reason for contacting us?Importance of DNS

• DNS is the ‘IP Address directory’ of the internet

• Translates the domain/sub domain in every URL request to an IP Address

• DNS is the critical ‘first step’ for your end customers to reach your site

• If your DNS is unavailable, your site is unavailable

• When your IP address changes, you need to update that DNS and propagate fast

What was the reason for contacting us?Why Dyn?

• Evaluated DNS in lead up to a major data centre migration

• Over 100 domains to move

• Wanted a specialist DNS provider

• Focus on Uptime / Speed / Propagation / Scale

• Ability to load balance across data centresTIP : Note that doing DNS Load balancing can dramatically increase the number of DNS queries which has a direct effect on costs so plan your needs carefully

What was the reason for contacting us?Why Dyn?

• Ability to self-manage our DNS

• Ability to automate DNS changes

• Ability to see DNS query statistics

• Key partner / working relationship / 24 x 7 support

• Right cost structure for business of our size

What was the reason for contacting us?Architecture

Dyn Anycast Network

Dyn DNS & Data Centre Load Balancing

Firewalls

Local Load Balancers

VM Web Servers

VM App Servers

Firewalls

DB Servers (Failover)

VM Back Office (Failover)

Firewalls

Local Load Balancers

VM Web Servers

VM App Servers

Firewalls

DB Servers (Active)

VM Back Office (Active)

CDN

Storage

Miscellaneous Web

Monitoring

Analytics

CRM

DC1 DC2 Cloud/External Services

A record (2/3) A record (1/3) A / CNAME

What was the reason for contacting us?Data Centre DNS Migration

Plan

Move Existing DNS to Dyn

Migrate DNS to DC1

Load Balance to DC2

What was the reason for contacting us?Move of existing DNS

• Add the Dyn transfer IP to the ‘AXFR’ DNS attribute for all existing domains

• Provide Dyn with list of a ‘Zones’ (domains) to import from your current DNS provider(s)

• Review all DNS resource records have imported correctly via the Dyn Portal

TIP : At this point DO NOT make any further resource record changes until transfer is

fully complete

• Request each domains registrar to change the existing authoritative NS to Dyn NS

TIP : Some TLD registries require written authorisation for NS changes so allow time

for this in your overall project

TIP : If you have a lot of domains to move do them in batches to make verification

simpler

• Check queries start to flow to Dyn (online statistics in Dyn Portal)

What was the reason for contacting us?Switch on new DC’s

• Allow 7 days for any residual traffic (due to DNS caching) to disappear

from the original Name Servers (NS)

• Decommission original DNS provider(s) / NS

• Prepare all resource record changes

• Prepare any Dyn support needs

• Use customer portal to make changes manually or script via api

• VERIFY

TIP – we were going from Active/Passive DC’s to Active/Active so we made our

changes in two tranches. Firstly get up and running on one DC and then set up

the DNS load balancing to bring the second DC into play

What was the reason for contacting us?On-going Management

• Use the customer portal for any adhoc changes

• Review your usage stats regularly

• Use the Dyn team for help and advice

What was the reason for contacting us?Future Steps

• Automation

• Dyn can automatically handle DC failover if your architectural design accommodates it

• For our use case we need manual control of failovers, but want to make the process happen as fast as possible

• Answer : Dyn REST API’s


Thank you!


Next Webinar:Wednesday, June 19

Everything You Need To Know About DDoS

Dyn Director of DNS OperationsAndrew Sullivan

seatwave & tagman talk dyn managed dns

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