Oracle buys Dyn

https://www.oracle.com/corporate/acquisitions/dyn/index.html

by tribaal • 10 years ago

229 126 10 years ago

talideon• 10 years ago

I don't see this as a good thing at all. Dyn themselves are a good enough company, but Oracle's culture could easily leach in.

mnw21cam• 10 years ago

Indeed. My first reaction was "Oh <insert swear word of choice>, there go my domains".

JustSomeNobody2• 10 years ago

I wonder how soon we'll see those "preeminent" brands jump.

piran2• 10 years ago

I'm sure brands won't change. Dyn has too much of a market share for Oracle to rebrand dyn. Oracle has followed this same strategy with other acquisitions.

nailer• 10 years ago

They got rid of Sun pretty quickly - and while they didn't have the market share at the time they did have a better reputation than Oracle did.

JustSomeNobody2• 10 years ago

On the linked page they talk about the brands (Netflix, etc) that are using Dyn. Those are the ones I meant. I wonder if Oracle will be seen as a good thing or a bad thing to these companies.

Spooky232• 10 years ago

Expect more of this stuff ahead.

These big companies have so much money sitting around doing nothing.

themgt• 10 years ago

Oracle is currently reviewing the existing Dyn product roadmap and will be providing guidance to customers in accordance with Oracle's standard product communication policies. Any resulting features and timing of release of such features as determined by Oracle's review of Dyn' product roadmap are at the sole discretion of Oracle.

Sounds promising!

pieter1976• 10 years ago

I assume that was sarcasm, right?

unixhero• 10 years ago

A bright future ahead for all customers!

*snark intended

kps• 10 years ago

“Jump! Jump now!” — Kosh Naranek

qwertyuiop9244• 10 years ago

Indeed.

I probably would have picked Cantrill for the quote myself, but I have absolutely no subtlety.

linuxlizard• 10 years ago

I'm now looking for recommendations for another DNS provider. USA or Europe preferred. Anyone have any?

alex_hitchins3• 10 years ago

I too am looking for alternatives. I moved to Dyn from ZoneEdit, I may look to go back.

Has anyone favourable experience with Route53?

module0000• 10 years ago

Has anyone favourable experience with Route53?

Yes, using it commercially(for work) and for personal domains. The pricing is incredibly low, and I haven't had an outage/hiccup since it launched.

jlgaddis• 10 years ago

Ugh, I definitely wouldn't recommend going back to ZoneEdit (now "easyDNS").

raesene6• 10 years ago

FWIW I like dnsimple . I've got domains on both services and I'll be moving my last stuff off dyn and onto dnsimple after this, no desire to be a customer of Oracle's.

XorNot• 10 years ago

namecheap work well for me.

kogepathic• 10 years ago

We're in the process of migrating away from Namecheap. They've been having DNS issues lately, as recently as last week (16 November) their entire DNS infrastructure was unexpectedly down for several hours. [0] Took all our sites offline.

$ host mydomain.com dns1.name-services.com
;; connection timed out; no servers could be reached

They're cheap, but have been experiencing some real reliability issues as of late. Other registrars offer pretty similar pricing and don't suffer from as frequent outages.

We were hardly the only people affected. Check their Twitter[1] for other people complaining of DNS outages.

Also, their new admin portal redesign sucks. Tons of white space and managing domains now requires many more clicks than it did before. Their zone management interface also frequently fails to update the zone.

Gandi's zone management interface is a million times better.

[0] http://status.namecheap.com/archives/28960

[1] https://twitter.com/namecheap

jdwithit2• 10 years ago

We balance our domains across Dyn and UltraDNS. No complaints about UltraDNS so far. Has just worked, and they have a decent REST API which is nice (as does Dyn).

LinuxBender2• 10 years ago

We were on UltraDNS for a few years. They started receiving nearly quarterly DDoS attacks and then tried to try to sell us DDoS scrubbing services. From there we moved to Dyn and have been happy. The DDoS that took out Dyn for a while would have take any single provider offline.

zippergz• 10 years ago

I use a combination of DNS Made Easy and Route 53. Both have worked well for me.

stevekemp6• 10 years ago

This is a good thing to do. Rather than host all your DNS records at any one provider, split them across two.

That allows you to keep on running even if your provider suffers a DDos, or outage. (As Dyn famously did recently.)

problems3• 10 years ago

CloudFlare. It's free and bulletproof, even if you don't use their protective reverse proxy you can use their DNS service for free and it has a dynamic updating API.

Unlike other providers (looking at you Amazon with your handling of Wikileaks) they've also proven themselves willing to stand up for their customers, even free ones legally.

brianwawok2• 10 years ago

Cloudflare is not bulletproof. Had several times where cloudflare proxy plus my Nginx server got stuck in infinite loops making everything time out. No logical reason why. Switched to cloudCDN and 0 problems since.

kalefranz• 10 years ago

+1 for Cloudflare. For failover and such, I'm watching for how their traffic control and traffic manager features evolve. https://blog.cloudflare.com/cloudflare-traffic/

kevin_b_er• 10 years ago

They will, however, acquire an SSL cert in your name for themselves when you use their DNS service.

tyingq2• 10 years ago

Some ideas:

Google's Cloud DNS: https://cloud.google.com/dns/pricing

Route 53: https://aws.amazon.com/route53/

Dns Made Easy: http://www.dnsmadeeasy.com/

Dnsperf.com is also a good resource to compare speed and reliability of DNS providers.

verandaguy• 10 years ago

I've been using Route53 for the last 3 years, and I'll vouch for it. It's pretty sweet -- the UI is clear, but allows for a decent amount of configuration, and it's reliable. It also integrates with major registrars (GANDI's a big one) and lets you manage domain ownership via an AWS account -- and personally, I prefer unified bills.

tracker13• 10 years ago

Not sure if it's the same service, but if you're using Google as your registrar, DNS seems to be included... would be surprised if it wasn't the same infrastructure.

I've heard good things about AWS Route53 as well.

larrysalibra• 10 years ago

NYC-based NS1: https://ns1.com

stevekemp6• 10 years ago

Ironically they're now down - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13019858

gbrown_• 10 years ago

2016 keeps on delivering.

helthanatos• 10 years ago

Who are they going to sue now?

astrodust2• 10 years ago

The internet.

On a more serious note, does Dyn perhaps have any interesting patents?

scarmig6• 10 years ago

Bye, Dyn. It was nice while it lasted, but I think it's time for both of us to move on.

Mojah3• 10 years ago

For everyone currently rushing to move their DNS records away from Dyn to alternative providers; don't panic.

Moving your DNS isn't hard, but is basically a hit-or-miss: it either works or it doesn't. I'm working on a tool to help monitor DNS changes that can help in migration scenario's by letting you know if any unwanted DNS records have changed.

I'm looking for any feedback you may have, you can sign up for the beta here: https://dnsspy.io/

(Ps; it seems shameless to plug a new service in a thread where a company just got bought, but I truly believe it can help ease the migration pain some may be feeling. Feel free to downvote if it makes no sense here or if it's just too blunt. Apologies, in that case.)

scarmig6• 10 years ago

Note that signing up puts you on a waitlist and doesn't, immediately at least, get you onto the beta.

Mojah3• 10 years ago

True, I should've clarified that.

Those who've joined the beta waiting list (by entering their e-mail address on the homepage) should get in within days. But I also don't want to rush things and break functionality, so I'm still being careful here.

godzillabrennus2• 10 years ago

DYN did a lot more than just Authoritative DNS. They did monitoring that then would facilitate a failover to different hosting environments, creating a quick active active or active passive failover depending on your configuration. They offered this with a complete web GUI that had permission controls that were granular so newer techs or less technical employees could login and manage just a single record or series of records.

Not to mention their solutions are very fast.

I'm not aware of any other dns host that does all of this.

Mojah3• 10 years ago

Absolutely!

This only applies if you used Dyn as a DNS provider with DDoS protection, not if you've used any of their failover capacity.

Having said that, I also don't think people should rush to get away from Dyn. Take your time, evaluate the buy and see where the service goes in a few months. If nothing changes for you, why even bother changing?

manigandham• 10 years ago

Route53, Azure, and NSOne have it already. CloudFlare is about to have it too. Google Cloud solves this with global load balancers if you're running in their cloud.

There are several other DNS providers that have varying levels of this functionality. There is nothing unique about Dyn except their pricing.

ComodoHacker• 10 years ago

Moving your DNS isn't hard

I bet Oracle wouldn't bother buying Dyn if it wasn't hard, especially for big customers.

stevekemp6• 10 years ago

DNS is easy, mostly.

Most users just don't care about DNS, so they use their domain-registrars' offerings (which are frequently terrible). The people who do care seem to pick their provider based on either price, or on features such as non-standard record types (the various different hacks to allow top-level CNAMES, or the ability to return different results on a GeoIP basis.)

Once you start relying on these special things moving becomes hard - because different providers either don't offer them or don't offer them the same way.

rconti• 10 years ago

looks at a thousand domain names across dozens of foreign registrars, running on tinydns, with views that may or may not work anymore

Welp, at least I'm not on Dyn!

stevekemp6• 10 years ago

I think we've interacted in the past my service is the reverse of yours - storing DNS records in git repositories:

https://dns-api.com/

I picked up a few new users at the last Dyn DDoS attack; I'm actually surprised many (Dyn) customers moved away entirely. To get redundancy users should add their DNS records to, say, Route53 AND Dyn, not just jump-ship to a new provider.

makmanalp3• 10 years ago

Not really a fan of oracle at all, but I have to congratulate the Dyn folks for how far they came from a dormroom server at WPI. I had the pleasure of spending a short summer internship there, and it was a formative experience. They had not only great engineering but also some of the most impressive sysadmin / ops people I've known. Especially the network stuff is a dying art these days.

bogomipz4• 10 years ago

What is WPI?

JonFish85• 10 years ago

Guessing "Worcester Polytechnic Institute".

lstamour• 10 years ago

https://web.wpi.edu/offices/cei/hitchcock.html

makmanalp3• 10 years ago

A tiny engineering school in Massachusetts. I'll spare you the marketing-heavy website, but It's an awesome place with a small-town feel, where nerdy pursuits are encouraged and helped to flourish into professions and businesses.

lwhalen• 10 years ago

"We Produce Idiots"

Source: went there in the early aughts, loved it (the teachers, the environment, the people... not so much the administration)

alyandon• 10 years ago

Any idea what happens to those of us that have legacy lifetime accounts for supporting Dyn in the early days?

godzillabrennus2• 10 years ago

If Oracle rebrands the tech they'll likely tell you the DYN products are being abandoned and you need to start paying for the new oracle branded stuff.

Time to switch if you care about your service.

ProAm• 10 years ago

It's not your lifetime it's theirs and Dyn just got put into hospice.

scolson• 10 years ago

How long until I get screwed on my old lifetime custom zone

tracker13• 10 years ago

If you have domains.google as your registrar, they include google's dns, which has been very nice, it does support dynamic usage as well.

squozzer• 10 years ago

The timimg of the acquisition with Dyn's recent DDOS has me feeling even more paranoid than usual.

bsimpson• 10 years ago

That's a great DNS service you've got there; be a shame if someone were to DOS it.

nikanj2• 10 years ago

"Huh, looks like the world really depends on this service. Probably means we can charge $oracle_moneys for it. Better send them an offer."

mrweasel2• 10 years ago

Does Oracle know that people expect that everything Oracle touches will turn into garbage?

I mean Oracles image is absolutely terrible among everyone but a small subsection of large companies. Arguably it doesn't seem to matter, Oracle isn't going out of business any time soon, but I can't imaging that their brand isn't suffering to some extend.

scarmig6• 10 years ago

Somewhat recently underwent an acquisition by Oracle. A very few meager retention bonuses were given out (on the order of 5% of engineers). An immediate exodus of most of the engineers, including those offered retention bonuses, began.

It seems counterproductive, but the trick was this: Oracle gained ownership of our contracts with other companies. Now, you might say, how the hell are you going to keep our products running if everyone who knows anything about them has left and they're all falling apart?

The answer is: this is upside for Oracle, not downside. They're big enough that they can ream customers by forcing them to pay for overpriced consultants to fix the problems Oracle itself caused.

mrweasel2• 10 years ago

But aren't the customers going to leave Oracle in the long run?

I'm not saying it's not working, because Oracle is clearly doing fine. It just seems rather short term, and really unethical.

shmerl• 10 years ago

I guess people already know about what to expect from the story of Sun.

notacoward2• 10 years ago

It's because that "small subsection of large companies" includes the people who have the money and buy the stuff. It's not very useful to dismiss them. Oracle knows that their image among techies is absolute crap. They don't care. Why should they? There's an actual business lesson to be learned from them, for those who care to try.

nimrody• 10 years ago

Not that I'm an Oracle fan, but they do continue to develop MySQL. Both in terms of features and performance.

Oracle still invests heavily in the development of the JVM (graal and truffle aim to advance the state of art in JIT compilers)

So it's definitely not all bad (virtualbox is also used by many but unlike MySQL I don't follow the development)

qwertyuiop9244• 10 years ago

MySQL is rubbish compared to many things (seriously. It's kind of amazing), although I won't discount how useful is, and how much Oracle has made the situation better.

The JVM stuff and virtualbox are both pretty good. I don't know how Oracle has refrained from mucking them up.

But if there's any product that you actually have to pay for, Oracle has screwed it up.

nikanj2• 10 years ago

The single biggest thing we're getting in Java 9 is the ability to better run different jars on the same JVM.

Meanwhile, everyone and their dog moves towards containers and similar isolation technologies.

qwertyuiop9244• 10 years ago

Well, this will no doubt go well.

I'm so excited to see what ...improvements... oracle will make to the Dyn product line. I mean, just look at all the exciting ...improvements... they made at Sun, and all of the other (too many to name) companies they bought out!

zzzzzzzzzman3• 10 years ago

As an employee of Oracle that sells Sun stuff, it really isn't all that bad :)

But we are all lol'ing at the parallels here. A number of our colleagues went to work for Dyn recently, too haha...

notacoward2• 10 years ago

How do they feel about this? Are they laughing like you are?

randylahey• 10 years ago

isn't all that bad

So, how would you characterize it? Somewhat bad? Doesn't it bother you to work somewhere so universally reviled?

astrodust2• 10 years ago

How long until getting set-up on Dyn requires a downloader to download an installer that might put the Ask Toolbar on your machine unless you uncheck a sneaky default?

Fucking Oracle.

tw04• 10 years ago

I'm curious - does anyone know if Dyn uses Oracle databases on the backend? Oracle seems to making a land grab for any *aaS provider that's using their DBs. Presumably because they realize their DB business is quickly being eaten by cloud providers and people sick of their "audits" (read: extortion tactics).

tyingq2• 10 years ago

Their job postings ask for this:

"Knowledge of databases such as PostgreSQL, MySQL, Cassandra, RDS, DynamoDB"

toyg• 10 years ago

They tend to buy what their customers use, not necessarily their own clients. They probably identified DYN as a common provider among a subset of their customers and thought it would make for a good acquisition.

technion• 10 years ago

Well I know Comodo does. I know this because if you enter any invalid data at a purchasing screen, you get Oracle error codes presented right on your screen.

Last tested a year ago.

themihai• 10 years ago

I bet the first change'll be to replace the pricing page with a contact form/quote so that you can talk with a sales manager about your "enterprise" requirements. Not very exciting for start-ups.

gregmac• 10 years ago

Yep. It's funny, because it makes sense short-term. Why bother with the headaches of little startups when you can have a single "enterprise" customer paying as much as dozens or hundreds of them? It's easier to provide service to a a few hundred big customers than hundreds of thousands of little ones.

Of course, then someone sees the gap, and provides service to all those little startups, and grows from there. Until they get purchased by a big "enterprise" company and the cycle repeats.

I bet anyone competing with Dyn right now is pretty happy with this news.

bogomipz4• 10 years ago

Can anyone speculate on why this made sense to Oracle? Would it be to complement Oracle Cloud?

qwertyuiop9244• 10 years ago

You don't understand: in order for Oracle to acquire it, it doesn't have to make sense: it just has to make money.

bogomipz4• 10 years ago

LOL, that was honestly my initial conclusion but I thought I was being too blunt.

excalibur• 10 years ago

1. Symantec buys LifeLock 2. Oracle buys DYN 3. Oracle buys massive protection policy for DYN via LifeLock 4. DYN gets hacked 5. Oracle submits massive insurance claim 6. Symantec stock tanks 7. Oracle acquires Symantec dirt cheap

bdwalter• 10 years ago

As a long time lover of Dyn and long time hater of Oracle, this deal just makes me sick.

Anyone have good experience w/ NS1 or Neustar? I need good GSLB for active/active...

nodesocket• 10 years ago

Highly recommend AWS Route53. You don't have to be using AWS to use Route53. It is solid, global anycast, and supports heath checks and geo DNS.

bigdubs• 10 years ago

I'm moving my personal domains over to Route53. DYN's standard service is pretty expensive as it is.

fapjacks• 10 years ago

Seconded. I still keep a DNSMadeEasy account around for some things, but Route53 just is great.

LogicX• 10 years ago

I use ns1 and am very pleased with the service. Many options for handling your responses (based on uptime, geo, etc)

stevekemp6• 10 years ago

Ironically they're now down - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13019858

rtvasan• 10 years ago

Oracle will probably end up just milking the Dyn installed base - and also try to leverage Dyn for the multiple Oracle public/private cloud efforts. However this is a great day for Dyn competitors like NS1!!

diminish• 10 years ago

There's still a great value hiding in enterprise software for startups. De-oracling the fortune 500 or de-consulting the enterprise from enterprise vendors still looks away. But SMB SaaS growing up and eating internal departments is still possible. Or a juggernaut big Mac of enterprise with fixed price menu and a million solution providers is another.

Illniyar• 10 years ago

Do we know for how much was the sale?

Any writeup fromdyn?

zimbatm• 10 years ago

If you're looking for another provider I recommend http://dnsmadeeasy.com/ . It's cheaper, faster, better uptime and supports ANAME records.

tmcz26• 10 years ago

Second that. Excellent uptime and pricing. Can't recommend them enough.

ironchief• 10 years ago

Exited for half a unicorn based up in New Hampshire!

ChuckMcM• 10 years ago

Interesting play for Oracle. Dyn was in the news a lot lately due to IoT type DDoS vectors, are these thing connected? Is Dyn looking at some sort of lawsuit with regard to 'enabling'?

philjr• 10 years ago

Right. So most folks here aren't following the "enterprise" space too much, but disclaimer: I work at Workday, a direct competitor to Oracle in the Business Management (ERP) software space. My background's in hosting & infrastructure.

Oracle are losing a lot of Oracle database licenses at the enterprise level and when they look around, the "cloud" is one of the main reasons why. They sell a bunch of jumped up 1990's applications which are mostly thin, crappy wrappers around a sophisticated database and their database, despite a lot of accounting and sales tactics that say otherwise, is still their main earner. You can't, unfortunately, see that anywhere, however, so I can't cite anything :-) So, enterprise customers, who are mostly the people buying their database are moving towards the "cloud" eating some of Oracle's lunch.

As a result, Oracle sees a growth opportunity in the "Cloud" arena - both on the infrastructure (AWS) and the application space (ERP). https://www.oracle.com/corporate/pressrelease/database-bench...

So they recently bought Dyn, Palerra & LogFire so you can see a pattern here. Dyn are just more "internet famous", but this is a pattern [1]

Lots and lots of talk recently from Ellison about their strategy.

http://www.networkworld.com/article/3123408/cloud-computing/... http://www.forbes.com/sites/oracle/2016/10/17/larry-ellisons...

It'll be interesting to see the duck tape and glue they use to jam all this crap together, but I think they're fighting an uphill battle with an incumbent that's years ahead of them on the product side. However, this is Enterprise world, and best product definitely does not always win. Oracle have a long history of selling successfully to Enterprises through fairly aggressive sales tactics. I'm not surprised if they see a market opportunity given how unfriendly AWS & GCE can be from an enterprise perspective.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_acquisitions_by_Oracle

Oracle buys Dyn

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