Last month, the entire internet went down for a few hours. At least that’s what one of the biggest denial-of-service attacks in recent memory felt like to a lot of people. Sites from Netflix, Spotify, and Reddit to The New York Times and, yes, even WIRED went dark.
The massive outage was the result of an attack on an Internet infrastructure company called Dyn. You’d think that finding yourself at the center of such a destructive online maelstrom wouldn’t be much of a sales pitch. But it seems to have worked out for Dyn: today database giant Oracle said it plans to acquire the company.
Dyn is best known for providing domain name system (DNS) services–essentially address books for the internet that help websites tell the world how to get from an address like “wired.com” to the web servers that host the pages. Oracle, meanwhile, is best known for selling business software to large companies. But Oracle is also in the midst of a reinvention: it wants to become a cloud computing company that can compete with the likes of Amazon and Google. In that case, the acquisition of Dyn just might give Oracle a much-needed asset. The services Dyn provides has enabled it to gather a wealth of data about how the modern Internet works—including data on the sorts of attacks that crippled its own servers last month. That’s the sort of competitive insight Oracle will need to make it in the crowded cloud computing market.
Oracle competes head-on with Amazon for cloud customers, but Amazon has an enormous head start. Most analysts estimate Amazon now commands the bulk of the cloud market, and based on quarterly revenue growth, it still appears to be growing faster than its major competitors.
Amazon and Google already offer their own DNS services. So in a sense, Dyn just makes Oracle’s cloud offering more complete. But Dyn isn’t just another DNS provider.
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SOURCE: Wired
Klint Finley
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