Comment by creatonez
3 months ago
Sure, but that doesn't really help for user-facing services where people expect to either type a domain name in their browser or click on a search result, and end up on your website every time.
And the access controls of DNS services are often (but not always) not fine-grained enough to actually prevent someone from ignoring the procedure and changing every single subdomain at once.
> Sure, but that doesn't really help for user-facing services where people expect to either type a domain name in their browser or click on a search result, and end up on your website every time.
It does help. For example, at my company we have two public endpoints:
company-staging.com company.com
We roll out changes to company-staging.com first and have smoke tests which hit that endpoint. If the smoketests fail we stop the rollout to company.com.
Users hit company.com
That doesn’t help with rolling out updates to the DNS for company.com which is the point here. It’s always DNS because your pre-production smoke tests can’t test your production DNS configuration.
If I'm understanding it right, the idea is that the DNS configuration for company-staging.com is identical to that for company.com - same IPs and servers, DNS provider, domain registrar. Literally the only differences are s/company/company-staging/, all accesses should hit the same server with the same request other than the Host header.
Then you can update the DNS configuration for company-staging.com, and if that doesn't break there's very little scope for the update to company.com to go differently.
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