Google today announced the release of Nomulus – an open-source backend Registry platform that the company says it uses for its own domains platform.
A registry back-end platform performs the critical functions that are necessary for a domain name registry – including storing registration details and DNS information for all domain names, handling WHOIS queries and requests to buy, check, transfer, and renew domain names.
Google says it began work on Nomulus in 2011 when ICANN announced the biggest ever expansion of the Internet namespace, resulting in hundreds of entities applying to launch thousands of new domain extension. Google applied to operate a number of new generic TLDs, and thus built Nomulus to help run them.
The Java-based platform has been released under the Apache 2.0 license and is tightly integrated with Google’s own platform. It runs on App Engine and uses the Google Cloud Datastore as its backend database.
Donuts, which has applied to launch over 300 new domain extensions of its own has also contributed to the code base of Nomulus and said it would create its own instance to help Registrars explore Nomulus’s extensible provisioning protocol (EPP) interface.