Recently, I’ve been going to a lot of Hackathons. Now if you’re not familiar with these events, I like to think of a Hackathon as a sort of geek’s playground where solutions to everyday issues are hacked on. Of course, to make all this happen, it’s a matter of working with APIs from all sorts of different vendors while maintaining a fun environment for the hack teams.

The last thing I like to do on a weekend is go somewhere and be bombarded by a sales pitch. I’m thinking the rest of the folks at the Hackathon feel the same way, so we decided to promote ourselves a little differently than some of the other attending sponsors. We figured this would be a ‘good call’… kinda like using our Managed DNS and Email Delivery APIs in the first place.

If you’re interested in learning more about what our Managed DNS and Email Delivery APIs can do for you and your infrastructure needs, come find me at the next event!

On top of that, there are now many different types of media being consumed across a wide variety of devices.  Most campaigns need to be displayed properly on mobile, tablets and PCs, but what about TVs? I remember talking whimsically about Internet-ready TVs a few years back and now I’m talking to our customers on a daily basis about it!

With the increased use of Roku, Apple TV, Western Digital Live, and other media streaming hubs in this now crowded space, consumers are ditching their cable service to become an internet only media household.‘New TV’ is a big buzzword in Europe at the moment but for those still in the dark, it refers to any IP-delivered television. Not surprisingly, DNS management has a huge role to play in this since by decreasing the latency, content delivery networks (CDNs) can serve the ad content quicker. This means more impressions can be served and therefore more money made for the business.

Using DNS with advanced features, such as DynECT Traffic Management, means you can also serve license specific content to a geographical region. A good example of this is our client Netflix who serve on demand content to over nine countries worldwide. Each of those countries serves different content and to have that level of internal geo traffic management is a huge drain on resources.

This is one of the reasons why Dyn is a preferred supplier in this space. With our IP Anycast network in 17 strategic locations around the world, we are able to serve DNS queries in less than 20ms around the globe with advanced features like Geo Traffic Management to direct content hungry users to the fastest performing CDNs and data centres.

One of Dyn’s clients is Videoplaza, a group celebrating five years in the multi-screen space. They have seen an exponential growth of IP-delivered video advertising, especially when compared to traditional TV advertising.  Their sell side ad management platform Karbon is used to monetise video experiences across PCs, mobile devices, tablets, game consoles, OPTV and Smart TVs.

They have the ability to record your viewing patterns, ask for ratings, cross promote other content of interest and provide an overall better user experience than traditional channel hopping! On top of that, all of that data is then analyzed, and content specific ads are served accordingly.

The opportunity for ROI in IP-delivered TV ads is phenomenal due to the increased targeting capabilities that online advertising provides and is set to be an industry that continues to prove successful for Videoplaza and others in the space.

While this mobile app was traditionally intended to be a sales/marketing tool, Dyn will now position it as a DevOps tool for its customers.

This move, combined with the acquisition of Verelo in late 2012 and the hiring of Pete Cheslock as Dyn Director of Dev Tools, Donald Layden as Project Manager, Tools, and the promotion of Carl Levine to DevOps Evangelist, is proof that Dyn is committed to being an important voice and part of the DevOps community.

“At the root of Dyn has always been our excellence in engineering,” said Kyle York, Dyn Chief Revenue Officer. “We are committed to creating tools that answer the questions of engineers and members of the DevOps community throughout the world. The acquisition of Trendslide is a big step toward that guarantee.”

The Trendslide app aggregates data from the websites and apps users already use, and presents a simple graph for a single purpose: to give them a pulse on whether their key metrics are trending up, staying flat, or trending down. Dyn plans to integrate historical DNS and email data into Trendslide, in addition to 3rd party services like Gomez, New Relic, Thousand Eyes, Catchpoint, Keynote, Nagios and more.

In addition to acquiring the IP, co-Founder Benjamin Petrin will join Dyn as a Lead Developer, Tools, with a focus on innovative mobile experiences for Dyn customers.

The acquisition of Trendslide enhances Dyn’s commitment to Internet performance, reliability and scalability for more than 500,000 active self sign-up customers, 2500 enterprise customers and over five million users worldwide. This is a firm display that Dyn is diving into mobile technology as Native Push and SMS are two messaging areas the company is considering.

Dyn has a long history with Trendslide as Dyn CTO Cory von Wallenstein was the original investor and helped the company gain early traction and buzz. One of the hottest startups in New Hampshire, the Dyn executives saw an opportunity to acquire Trendslide while an acquisition was still viable as they were poised to raise an additional funding round.

In part, Trendslide’s success can be attributed to its strong advisory board, which included Richard Terry-Lloyd, VP of Emerging Markets, Zuora; Eric Hansen, Founder/CEO, SiteSpect; Ryan Burke, VP, Sales, Moontoast; Evan York, Senior Product Manager, Newforma; and Josh Deslisle, VP, Worldwide Sales, Dyn.

“This is a great home for the future of the Trendslide application,” added Ron Martin, Trendslide CEO. “As we were looking to raise capital, it was the common opinion of many VCs that this service should stay close to Dyn and focus on Infrastructure — not on marketing and sales analytics. It was good advice, so we decided this was the sensible move. We are happy with this outcome and excited to see the product carry on.”

ABOUT DYN

Incorporated in 2001, Dyn is the worldwide Internet Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) leader, powering Managed DNS, Traffic Management, Email Delivery & Email Reporting for more than four million enterprise, small business and personal users. With nearly 20 data centers around the world and industry-leading uptime for over 10 years, Dyn’s commitment to customer relationships and engineering excellence shines every day. Uptime is the Bottom Line.

Dyn Media Contact

Adam Coughlin | acoughlin@dyn.com | 603.714.5798

• What is the function of the system/service to be designed?
• How can we leverage existing systems or services?
• Is the design scalable?

What is sometimes less obvious is that the considerations for design should include all consumers of the service.

Often when one considers the design of a system, it is from the perspective of the consumer that service is geared toward. After all, they are the reason for designing and building the service, right? The important thing to keep in mind is that they are not the only consumer (or, in UML parlance, “actor”). There will almost certainly be other users of the service although they may not use it in the same way as the consumers for whom the service is intended.

In the case of services and systems at Dyn, there are two fairly obvious actors:

1. The customer: the folks who pay for the service. In the context of design, this actor could represent an individual interacting with our Web based UI or a piece of software interacting with our API or SMTP servers.
2. The third party consumer: those that issue requests to us for DNS data or who receive an email.

However, there are a number of other actors that we need to consider with our systems. The better we can cater to all these actors, the less we will have to spend time supporting the system. Other actors that we try to consider include:

Support users

These are the great folks that help out our customers when any difficulties arise. As smart as they are, if we don’t design our system to give them what they need, they won’t be able to effectively do their job. Our development team interacts with the folks in Support on a regular basis and a portion of our job is to make their job as easy as possible.

Operations personnel

Our operations team is tasked with measuring the health and performance of our services and systems and to act as a front line in case any problems arise. If they are not able to see into our software systems, how would they be able to do their job? The short answer is “ineffectively”. This means that any system to be put into production use must not only provide methods of inspection, but they must be as granular as possible.

Without sufficient entry points into the system, it will be very difficult to discover where any issues might lie.

Scripts/Utilities/Services

One of the consumers of our software and services is our own software and services. Interaction between different systems is an inevitability once the service base gets to a certain size. If work is not done in advance to make the interfaces for a system consumable by software as well as humans, this sort of interaction becomes inordinately more difficult. Consistency and documentation of interface, consistency of data representation; these are musts.

Developers

Don’t forget about these folks! I’m not just talking about things like verbosity of comments, code formatting and using meaningful variable names. Does the code lend itself to debugging? Profiling? Unit/functional/integration testing? Is the flow easy to follow?

For those that haven’t heard this umpteen million times already, keep in mind that you might just be the poor person who will have to decipher a system…and potentially long after the design has been flushed from your in-brain cache.

Do you have specific actors that you consider when designing systems that I didn’t talk about here? I’d like to hear about it, so email me with the details!

However, I’m finally over it.

The verbiage is here to stay. Cloud encompasses a technology spectrum of words and represents a proven business model. Its power is in its nebulous definition: SaaS (products sold as a service), subscription, scalable, rentable, easy-to-use, shared. Yeah, it’s time to embrace it.

It was the early winter of 2010 during an executive planning retreat where Dyn CEO Jeremy Hitchcock called me out. It went something like this.

Jeremy: “You need to sell more advanced traffic management features. We have tools that allow our clients to move to cloud services faster and easier.”

Me: “Yeah, no kidding. If only it was that simple. Our clients’ infrastructure isn’t there yet. They aren’t ready to implement these products.”

Jeremy: “Only 15% of our DynECT Managed DNS clients leverage these products and they are incredibly powerful. It’s on us to educate and get client adoption up.”

Me: “I’m telling you, we push them hard, the market just isn’t quite there yet. The 15% are the early adopters who know the power of premium DNS as a real time traffic controller. The rest of the Internet is 12-to-18 months behind. They’ll catch up.”

Jeremy: “I don’t care the reason. Sell more. Our clients will see immense value. We can help them get active-active or active-passive global deployments faster. ‘Uptime is the Bottom Line’ is our mantra, right? Let’s own the promise. It’s not just about our rock solid systems, it’s about making theirs that way too.”

Me: “Couldn’t agree more. Challenge accepted.”

And so we launched our “Hey, 1995 Called & Wants Its Hardware Load Balancers Back” campaign in May 2011 at old-school enterprise conference Interop Las Vegas. The rest is history…with untapped and serious upside ahead.

Inside The Numbers

As of this post, 48% of our enterprise customers are utilizing a traffic management service for disaster recovery, cloud load balancing, geographic regional routing, latency-based routing, or our granular geographic IP routing services. All of these services are made powerful by sophisticated monitoring, a robust REST API and a customizable rules engine that puts a deeper level of control into our customers’ hands — just how they want it.

If we look even deeper into the actual usage of these advanced features, we see some customers using traffic management on as many as 310 zones. We have some of the data summarized below.

At this point, a significantly higher portion of our customers in the higher traffic tiers use these advanced services:

The usage of advanced features is especially high in certain verticals of technology companies. Advertising (74%) and Games/Video/Entertainment (60%) particularly stand out.

Today, our customers are creating an Infrastructure stack with redundant providers of colocation, cloud or managed hosting, content delivery, web acceleration, transit, storage/database servers, routers, switches and more. The amount of money spent behind our content agnostic services makes the investment in what we do a simple one. We help prevent vendor lock-in and allow our customers diversity across and down the stack.

The market has caught up and now we innovate on that top 15% as they drive our product roadmap forging ahead. It’s a proven way to do R&D and serve a rapidly growing Internet audience who’s end user expectations are higher than ever.

As Dyn evolves from a world leading DNS and email delivery provider to a more rounded provider of Internet performance technologies, we’ll continue to expose more stats like this (like we did last month with what hosting providers our clients use) and provide even more insight into your entire external infrastructure — traffic, messaging and more. Your customers’ experience is on us to help solve.

Enjoy your cloud load balancing through Dyn and apologies to F5, A10, Citrix, and Cisco for disrupting the CapEX party.

But what if there was a way? That’s impossible….or is it?

The Problem

Let’s say you had a primary and a secondary DNS provider, but wanted to add Traffic Management to a hostname. You could easily do that on your primary DNS provider, but when the transfer goes out to the secondary provider, all the proprietary load balancing goodness disappears. No more monitoring, weighting, serve counts, etc –  just plain jane records.

You could convert the secondary to another primary zone to run dual primary, but now you need to keep two zones in sync and pay for advanced features from both providers. This is costly and requires major integration work.

The Solution

If you were to create a new management zone, you can add a CNAME record from the redundant zone out to a second zone containing the advanced features. Because there is just a CNAME on the hostname, you don’t have the issue with losing the complex functionality of Traffic Management when the primary sends the update to the secondary.

Here is a breakdown of how it could look:

1. Create a new zone, purely for management such at “example-mgt.com”.
2. Create a node off the new zone so you can add the CNAMEs, like “tm1.example-mgt.com”
3. Create the service & configure as you would normally.
4. Finally, CNAME from the location where you want the service to operate. www.example.com –CNAME–> tm1.example-mgt.com”

Traffic will now be diverted from there to the Traffic Management service and finally to the endpoint located in the service. You won’t be fully redundant because you are having both providers point to a central management zone, but it does allow for two networks to hand out your zone. Also, there will be a second lookup due to the CNAME. In response, that CNAME can have a large TTL to provide some caching.

You get the point. I’m fed up with how disconnected the internet actually is with the real world. To placate my own disgruntled attitude, I’ve invented a social game using Twitter that kicks off this weekend at TechCrunch Disrupt in New York City:

#PASSTAG

The concept is pretty simple. We made a giant physical hashtag with simple instructions:

1. Find something you want to hashtag.
2. Take a picture and start your tweet just like this: “#Passtag @DynInc” Simple as that!
3. Pass the physical hashtag to someone else.

The goal is to see how far the hashtag travels by tracking “#Passtag” on Twitter. Look for us in NYC all week and follow the hashtag on Twitter.

So with honor, and much respect for the interwebs, I kick it off here:

#Passtag @dynic And so begins a social experiment…how far will this hashtag travel? twitter.com/DynInc/status/…

— Dyn (@DynInc) April 26, 2013

Here are some of our key takeaways:

• The top 15 hosting providers together accounted for under 35% of where our customers are hosted.
• This means the remaining 65% are either self-hosted or are using smaller hosting providers.
• These numbers go further when we look at a wide cross-section of Alexa websites: 25% for the Alexa 10K and 21% for the Alexa 100K.
• Amazon AWS, Rackspace and Softlayer clearly hold the top three spots for market share.

Here’s what we found, thanks to some great insight from our friends at Datanyze:

DynECT Customers

About 22% of our 2000+ DynECT enterprise level customers are hosted at either Amazon AWS, Rackspace and Softlayer with Amazon ranking No. 1.

Alexa 10K and Alexa 100K

Next up: Alexa 10K and 100K segments. Did we see any interesting patterns?

• AWS and Softlayer seem to have the highest market share in the Alexa 10K segment.
• Softlayer has the largest share in in the broader & lower traffic Alexa 100K segment.
• As expected, lower-priced hosting sites like GoDaddy, Ovh, and Hetzner had relatively higher market share in the Alexa 100K than in the Alexa 10K websites.

Large Enterprises

For this study, it was important for us to review websites with high traffic. However, we also wanted to look at where the large enterprises were hosted, defined as any company with more than 1000 employees. We looked at a total of 25K such enterprises globally for this analysis.

The total penetration for this segment is about 11.3%, with the graph below showing Rackspace with thrice the market share as the next largest provider. This will be an interesting market segment to keep an eye on.

Our conclusions

We’ll use this unique to Dyn customer hosting data to improve DynECT Managed DNS and Traffic Management services, prospect more joint accounts, and forge strong hosting partnerships with shared vendors of our esteemed clients. Amazon AWS, Rackspace and Softlayer prove to be glaringly obvious collaborative partners, but the opportunity for lower cost or specialized hosting providers to layer on a premium DNS services is equally apparent (see our favorites and host of Dyn.com, Firehost).

Using Managed DNS and DNS-based Traffic Management (load balancing) services as a performance facilitator, traffic controller, hosting redundancy enabler and overall abstraction layer for content delivery is on the rise. Let me know if there are any other interesting studies you’d like us to research and share.

Boustridge is the former President of BT Global Services, a company that delivers a combination of communications and IT services to customers organizations and governments worldwide. He joined BT Global Services in April 2007, assuming responsibility for all aspects of their operations and performance in the United States and Canada and Financial Services and finally running all of the Global MNC (MultiNational Customer) business.

Michael Boustridge.

“Michael brings a long-term view of technology and insight into how larger companies operate that will help us navigate our future,” said Jeremy Hitchcock, Dyn CEO.

The addition of Boustridge to Dyn’s board is another nod toward the company’s continued focus on international expansion and the development of new enterprise channels — two specialties of the Texas-based tech legend.

“When joining a board, I want to associate myself with companies that are applying innovative approaches to technology and solving real world problems,” Boustridge said. “I have found both of those with Dyn. This is a company with an amazing track record and an even brighter future. I am happy to be playing a small role in helping guide that future.”

Prior to the BT run, he was the Chief Sales and Chief Marketing Officer at EDS, an information technology equipment and services company founded by Ross Perot, where he led the company’s $22 billion global revenue sales engine.

In addition, Boustridge is member of the Board of Trustees for XPRIZE Foundation, an educational nonprofit organization with the mission to bring about radical breakthroughs for the benefit of humanity, as well as other high tech companies. He also sits on the board of Riverbed Technology, Inc., Ciber, Contact Solutions LLC, Presidio and Cyan.

Boustridge joins a board that already includes:

• Jeremy Hitchcock, Dyn CEO and co-founder
• Jason Calacanis, founder and CEO of Mahalo, co-founder of ThisWeekIn, co-founder and former CEO of Weblogs, Inc. (acq. by AOL) and a respected angel investor
• Ric Fulop, General Partner at North Bridge and co-founder of A123 Systems
• Russ Pyle, General Partner at North Bridge
• Scott Dussault, Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer of Demandware

ABOUT DYN

Incorporated in 2001, Dyn is the worldwide Internet Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) leader, powering Managed DNS, Traffic Management, Email Delivery & Email Reporting for more than four million enterprise, small business and personal users. With nearly 20 data centers around the world and industry-leading uptime for over 10 years, Dyn’s commitment to customer relationships and engineering excellence shines every day. Uptime is the Bottom Line.

Dyn Media Contact Adam Coughlin | acoughlin@dyn.com | 603.714.5798

It’s a home we like. We open it up to startup meet-ups, world-famous DynTini events, political figures, and the like because we are proud to be at the heart of movement in the Manchester area. However, we think that some of our guests should take off their coats and stay a while.

Whether you choose Manchester as your home base or one of the surrounding areas where innovation and entrepreneurship are the status quo, we’ve assembled a list of a few resources to help you along.

Looking for a great career or to meet like-minded professionals in the area?

• Stay Work Play – Statewide
• Manchester Young Professionals Network (MYPN) – Manchester, NH

Both MYPN and Stay Work Play host a number of meetups in the area. These events allow the young entrepreneur or professional to network with others and leverage the expertise of others. If you’re at that juncture in your career where you haven’t come up with the next big thing but could use a change, no problem. Both of these organizations provide a cache of job opportunities with great companies in the area — opportunities where you may be able to even get in on the ground floor of something big.

Is it time to move your new venture out of your spare bedroom? Connect with these organizations:

• abi Innovation Hub – Manchester, NH
• AlphaLoft – Portsmouth, NH
• NH-ICC – Portsmouth, NH
• Idea Greenhouse – Durham, NH
• Entrepreneurs Foundation of New Hampshire
• Boston Startup School
• Intelligent.ly

And these people:

• Matt Pierson
• Jesse Devitte, Borealis Ventures
• Northeast Angels
• TK Kuegler, Wasabi Ventures

Here’s A Few (But Not All) Notable Startups:

• Scribe
• Newforma
• Newmarket
• PlusGrace
• Mill33
• Trendslide
• Nearby Registry
• Envista
• FreePriceAlerts
• Ziftr
• RightBid
• Techlok
• Mosaic Archive
• Rustic Crust
• Nanocomp
• GearFreedom

Meetups

• Startup Grind
• Startup Manchester
• Boston Metro Area
• abi Founders Series

Contests

• TechOut
• NH Startup Challenge

Conferences

• Disruptivate
• A-Ha Summit

Universities

• Southern New Hampshire University
• UNH-Manchester

Great Blog Posts

• How To Build A Startup Ecosystem In A Small City
• 4 Reasons Why College Is The New Business Incubator
• Attract Talent by Building Relationships With Universities

The key to succeeding in the Southern New Hampshire tech scene is staying connected. Attend Meetup events, make some new friends and help out wherever you can. While we are individually responsible for the success of our startups here in the area, together, we are the catalyst that will make things a lot more prosperous across the board.