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563 points joncfoo | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0.203s | source
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jcrites ◴[] No.41205444[source]
Are there any good reasons to use a TLD like .internal for private-use applications, rather than just a regular gTLD like .com?

It's nice that this is available, but if I was building a new system today that was internal, I'd use a regular domain name as the root. There are a number of reasons, and one of them is that it's incredibly nice to have the flexibility to make a name visible on the Internet, even if it is completely private and internal.

You might want private names to be reachable that way if you're following a zero-trust security model, for example; and even if you aren't, it's helpful to have that flexibility in the future. It's undesirable for changes like these to require re-naming a system.

Using names that can't be resolved from the Internet feels like all downside. I think I'd be skeptical even if I was pretty sure that a given system would not ever need to be resolved from the Internet. [Edit:] Instead, you can use a domain name that you own publicly, like `example.com`, but only ever publish records for the domain on your private network, while retaining the option to publish them publicly later.

When I was leading Amazon's strategy for cloud-native AWS usage internally, we decided on an approach for DNS that used a .com domain as the root of everything for this reason, even for services that are only reachable from private networks. These services also employed regular public TLS certificates too (by default), for simplicity's sake. If a service needs to be reachable from a new network, or from the Internet, then it doesn't require any changes to naming or certificates, nor any messing about with CA certs on the client side. The security team was forward-thinking and was comfortable with this, though it does have tradeoffs, namely that the presence of names in CT logs can reveal information.

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bawolff ◴[] No.41205688[source]
I think there is a benefit that it reduces possibility of misconfiguration. You can't accidentally publish .internal. If you see a .internal name, there is never any possibility of confusion on that point.
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1. mnahkies ◴[] No.41205930[source]
Somewhat off topic, but I'm a big fan of fail safe setups.

One of the (relatively few) things that frustrate me about GKE is the integration with GCP IAP and k8 gateways - it's a separate resource to the http route and if you fail to apply it, or apply one with invalid configuration then it fails open.

I'd much prefer an interface where I could specify my intention next to the route and have it fail atomically and/or fail closed