CZ.NIC Is Further Strengthening The Anycast DNS Of The .CZ Zone By Launching A Site In Ukraine

Ukraine became the 14th country in addition to the Czech Republic where the Czech National Domain Administrator has a DNS anycast site; CZ.NIC servers are located on every continent in the world except Antarctica.

In cooperation with its Ukrainian partner, Hostmaster LLC (the administrator of the .UA domain), CZ.NIC has launched a new foreign site directly in Kyiv. The establishment of this site continues the Czech national domain administrator’s gradual expansion of its own DNS infrastructure worldwide and strengthening of the robustness of its DNS anycast. The DNS node in Kyiv is connected to the local Giganet peering node, whose size is comparable to the Czech NIX.CZ peering node. The new node will enhance the capacity of the DNS anycast in Europe and provide better availability and lower query latency not only for the .CZ domain and its users, but also for the domains of the partners hosted by CZ.NIC. Ukraine became the 14th country in addition to the Czech Republic where the Czech National Domain Administrator has a DNS anycast site; CZ.NIC servers are located on every continent in the world except Antarctica.

“The launch of the Kyiv site strengthens the capacity and scope of our anycast coverage in Europe, while introducing an element of reciprocity into our cooperation with the Ukrainian registry. The new site uses the BIRD routing daemon developed at CZ.NIC Labs and an implementation of the authoritative DNS server NSD is deployed here to ensure software diversity. Among others, the Kyiv DNS node handles part of the traffic from Poland, the Baltic States and Finland. Its operation has halved the average latency in this area. An interesting yet understandable fact is that despite its geographical location, virtually no DNS traffic from Russia or Belarus flows into the node,” said Tomáš Hála, IT Director of CZ.NIC.

In addition to the three locations in the Czech Republic, CZ.NIC servers are operated in 13 other countries. In Europe, the nodes are located in Austria (Vienna), Germany (Frankfurt am Main), the United Kingdom (London), Sweden (Stockholm), Italy (Milan) and Slovakia (Bratislava). In the US, the Association operates one node in a data center in Reston (in cooperation with ICANN) and, since 2021, also in the LINX NoVA peering center, with additional servers located on the West Coast (Seattle). In South America, it is Brazil (São Paulo) and Chile (Santiago de Chile). In Asia, the Association operates DNS servers in Japan (Tokyo) and also in Singapore (Singapore). In Africa, it is a location in Johannesburg, South Africa, and in Australia, in Sydney.