Why Cloud Registry?

In this first ever official blog post, we’re going to answer the most frequently asked question in our travels to various ICANN meetings — “why the name Cloud Registry?” Most of these questions stemmed from the “cloud” buzzword. While the term means different things to different people, it aptly describes the values that we stand behind.

The Spirit

To us, “cloud” embodies the spirit of being agile, streamlined, and adaptable to changes. We set out to redefine registry operations and empower would-be new gTLD applicants to set themselves apart by offering an innovative registry platform that will evolve with the needs of the market without significant technical expertise. We firmly believe that in order for a TLD to be successful, there needs to be an interdependent relationship between the registry operator and the back end service provider. To that end, we’ve mostly succeeded in finding the right balance between arming the applicants with enough tools and intelligence to make informed decisions and shielding the operational details from them.

The Form

The DNS is a core component of the Internet, and the registry system provides the authoritative data store and associated services for the TLD it hosts. It is therefore no surprise that registry operations demand air-tight security, robustness, scalability and high availability. These properties impose costs in terms of expertise and infrastructural resources.

Our unique blend of infrastructure and domain name expertise, coupled with a registry platform that was built from the ground up to be cloud-ready, we are able to deploy and effectively manage our registry to a variety of infrastructure configurations — traditional data centres, public or private clouds, as well as hybrid environment.

The Substance

The software and the infrastructure on which it is hosted work in tandem.

Systems that were not written with cloud based environments in mind will generally make many fatal assumptions leading to impedance mismatch that manifests as teething problems, security issues and prolonged outage when planted in such environments.

All too often, we hear software engineers make remarks like “it runs in the LAN, so this operation should be snappy”, or “server is behind the firewall, so we’re fine”. At Cloud Registry, we live by Murphy’s Law and practise Defense in depth. Our platform was written to be secure and resilient to failure.

Another negative outcome of impedance mismatch between infrastructure and software is the lack of scalability. While cloud infrastructure generally provides on-demand computing resources, monolithic software cannot take advantage of the dynamic resource availability. Again, our platform was carefully designed to take full advantage of cloud computing environment by having loosely-coupled components. Each component has a well-defined purpose, and may be duplicated giving rise to immense scalability and eliminating single points of failure.

The Silver Lining

For new gTLD applicants and ccTLD operators — our clients — you stand to benefit directly from our know-how, technology choices and our awesome platform. More tangibly, it translates to more control over your TLD, better service, more features and increased readiness to respond to market needs at a great price.

Ultimately, we are here to help you succeed by reducing friction and giving you the tools to complement your business model and policies so your TLD can fly!