Category: Uncategorised

History: URL and more

I had in my backlog a long post from Cloudflare about the history of URL. It actually contains much more info. So it is a really nice reading:

https://blog.cloudflare.com/the-history-of-the-url

There are many things that I didnt know but these two caught my attention:

The root DNS zone of the internet is composed of thirteen DNS server clusters. There are only 13 server clusters, because that’s all we can fit in a single UDP packet. Historically, DNS has operated through UDP packets, meaning the response to a request can never be more than 512 bytes.

I knew there were 13 root DNS cluster but I didnt think the reason why was the UDP packet size!

And from Punycode, interesting you can create emoji urls!

http://www.xn--vi8hiv.ws/

To cloud or not to cloud

This is nothing new. But I was reading an article about it and was a good refresh:

https://lwn.net/Articles/748106/

The article is a couple of years old but I think it is still relevant. Most people I know they have their infrastructure in the cloud. In my current job we are still based on bare metal due to the nature of our business but some years ago we were in that point when deciding what to do with our CI/CD environment. I wasnt involved in that decision (only in the deployment/implementation). Our capex was higher but long term (3y), it was cheaper to build in premise than in the cloud. I agree with the article that when you dont know how things are going to grow, scale requirements, etc cloud is the best choice. Once you ran pass the start-up phase, you should reconsider the position.