Smash Notes
Is it always DNS? with DNSimple's Anthony Eden
It’s one thing to joke about how “it’s always DNS” but it’s another to solve the problem by starting your own DNS Hosting and Domain Registration company. Some folks joke, but Anthony Eden started a company - DNSimple. Scott chats with Anthony about how he got started, how DNS works, and why DNSimple does it right.
People
Notes
-
On Hanselminutes, Microsoft is starting to move cloud services to the dot Microsoft top-level domain, and Microsoft says the change is more secure. Running the name and controlling the registry leaves one less point somebody can attack.
The Domain Name System was developed in the 80s, in a gentler time, when people worried about jokes more than about other people doing bad things. The web was still a gleam in someone's eye and was not even going to be a thing yet. The speaker says Sir Tim Berners-Lee may have been thinking about the web then, and is not even sure. The protocol has withstood the test of time, with pains along the way, from letter variations and from the operational side. The Domain Name System has long been a vector of DDoS attack because everybody has to have it. The protocol has to underlie pretty much everything, so it gets attacked regularly in all kinds of different ways.
The host asks why dot com is not fine for everyone, and why a dot ninja and a dot Microsoft are needed. Dot Microsoft is quite interesting for the obvious brand reasons. From the security perspective, Microsoft believes it can run the name and control the registry. A cloud name can sit at cloud dot Microsoft. For Microsoft, controlling the registry means one less point somebody can attack.
-
On Hanselminutes, a dashboard can show 41 registered domains beside 47 DNS zones. DNSimple says the extra zones might be a domain registered somewhere else and pointing at DNSimple, or a name that was never registered.
The domain control plane came from a limit DNSimple states outright: everybody using DNSimple all the time is not a reality. Some people mix DNSimple with Route 53, Azure DNS, other providers, or on-premise DNS like Core DNS. DNSimple built a way to connect into the other systems. From within DNSimple, zones at Azure and at DNSimple can be managed side by side in a bi-directional fashion and moved back and forth.
-
DNSimple gets record changes out through its own internal transfer system, and the bar for that system is Australia. The authoritative network has eight points of presence, data has to travel from the primary data center in the US to the furthest one, and default time-to-live values are set fairly low so a caching name server does not sit on a record for a day.
On Hanselminutes, Scott Hanselman said he stuck with DNSimple because a change such as exampleapp.hanselman.com showed up on refresh, and a text record for a certificate was visible when he went back to the command line. People updating a C name at GoDaddy would wait about 12 to 15 minutes for changes to propagate, and the demo never worked.
Anthony Eden said DNSimple does not rely on the usual protocols that synchronize servers. The internal system was built up to move changes to the edge quickly, the team measures the transfer, and when scaling slowed it down they redesigned how data moves. A registrar might default a time to live to a day, and a caching name server with a very long time to live is not going to clear itself.
You might also like
- How Did Anthony Eden Turn a Perl Alias Script Into an Erlang Name Server So a Naked Domain Could Point at Heroku?
- How Did the Last Couple of Years of Registrar Investment Make Dnsimple Split Almost Evenly Between Domain Registration and Operational Domain Name System Work?
- Why Does Domain Name Money Go to Registries Under Constant Attack While Innovation Stays With the Registrars?
- How Did a Few Months Building a Knowledge Base Pull Dnsimple Back to Staying Focused?
- How Did Dnsimple Replace a User-equals-account Login With a Many-to-many Relationship So One User Can Reach Many Accounts?
- Why Do Two Synchronous Connections at Domain Registries Make Availability Checks the Hard Part of Suggesting Names for Dnsimple?