🎉 CNDO #28: Moving TLDs to a better registrar, again

🗓️ What's new this week

🔴 Live show: Pull Request Automated Preview Environments with Uffizzi (Ep 231)

This week on my livestream, we'll talk about why I think everyone should automate their pull requests to create environments from Compose or Kubernetes YAML to preview the changes their PR is planning (assuming it's something you can preview). Join us live to get the why and how of PR-based "ephemeral environments" and more.

Nirmal and I welcome Grayson Adkins & Josh Thurman on the show. They are co-founders of Uffizzi, an environments-as-a-service company for Docker Compose and Kubernetes.

🎧 Podcast

Ep 138: Future of Kubernetes with Brendan Burns

In our recent podcast release, Matt and I welcome special guest Brendan Burns, CVP Azure Cloud Native & Resource Management, and also a founding member of the Kubernetes project.

You can get the show notes on the episode page.

We took some live questions as we always do from YouTube live, and I thought it was a great episode of a little mix of talking about Azure and some of the things you can do with containers, some of the things they're working on, some of the things that he's focused on that we haven't seen yet. We talk about AI and how that relates to some of these things.

We even talked about WASM (WebAssembly), one of my favorite topics of the last year, because that's important, so it was great to get his perspective.

And I think my favorite part of the show is where we talk about the next layers of abstraction, or maybe even the ways that we can deploy to Kubernetes or make it simpler to manage and deploy to. And that's been a real challenge for the community ever since Kubernetes was created in making it more accessible to more people without it being so complex to manage and deal with underneath. And Brendan has some great views on what it's going to take it to get us there.

👨‍💻 What I'm working on

Moving my domains to better registrars, again

A story of 25 years of owning domains and what I use and recommend now

I bought my first personal domain in the late 90s when I was the only one I knew with their own Internet Domain Name. The ICANN was forming, and I wanted to be part of the internet's future. Buying a domain back then was like buying land in Texas for drilling oil. I dreamed of total domain control, and the sky was the limit. I could make the internet without the restrictions of Geocities (the world's first plug-and-play website hoster.) Even my sysadmin friends thought I was being extravagant.

I bought fishbrains.com for two reasons. One, I was ready to host my website on my own domain (before we had WordPress, or the word "blog," for that matter). Two, I predicted that email would replace the postal service and everyone would need email, and I was tired of replacing my email address every time I moved to a new apartment with a new ISP that gave us a tiny inbox with our connection. I wanted a permanent email address for life.

Since the late 90s, I've collected domain names to create my internet.

I've bought over 50 domains at this point. Many of which I've let expire. Some for fun, like bret.lol for anyone to use as a localhost wildcard solution for local dev with friendly names and TLS. Some for short URLs like bret.news to find this Newsletter, and ones like solodevops.com (parked) to someday make a course or resources for that Solo DevOps who needs help.

I've never domain squatted for profit, but I do tend to buy domain names for ideas of things I want to make. Laura Tacho and I have had a few laughs that it's a bit of an addiction, always buying the domain name first before we get to work on ideas.

The good thing is in the 25 years since my first purchase of a .com for $93/year (adjusted for inflation), prices are now down to $9.77/year. That is, if you know where to look for a good and cheap name registrar.

I've used nearly 20 registrars in that time, that I can recall. For most of the 2000s, I used the now-defunct DynDNS. For the 2010s, I mostly used Tucows Hover and would recommend it (but it's not so cheap anymore). I tried many others like Google, Namecheap, AWS, GoDaddy, etc. but I always tried to stick with a trusted brand at a budget price without the B.S. and upselling.

Cloudflare does the internet a solid

So, when Cloudflare, a service I was already using for many things, started offering registrar services at no markup. It was game over for me with all the other registrars. I had mad respect for, and trust with, Cloudflare. They were now the cheapest for long-term domain holding. For the last few years, I've slowly moved every TLD Cloudflare supports over to them, saving hundreds a year, and it's been great.

The two main limits to Cloudflare registrar are that it doesn't support all the TLDs I use, and it's only usable for engineer types. I mean, it's a lot...

The Pragmatic Engineer saves the day

I still didn't have a solution for moving off Hover to a cheaper registrar for my less-popular TLDs like bret.live and bret.courses until I read a recent Pragmatic Engineer newsletter about the Google Domains shutdown.

After reading that, and a quick eval, I decided that Porkbun will be my other registrar to host the TLDs that Cloudflare doesn't support. It's an indie team based out of the US Pacific Northwest, seems to take security seriously, and maybe even a little fun to use... (e.g. step into The Buniverse)

Check out the excellent reporting by The Pragmatic Engineer, the Cloudflare registrar feature, and Porkbun.

🗓 Next big thing️

Come hang with me at DockerCon (speaking twice and hopefully live streaming!) and KubeCon Chicago (no speaking, but maybe streaming!) Let me know in our Discord server #conferences channel, and we'll meet up IRL.

👀 In case you missed it

Did you miss last week's newsletter? Read it here. I talk about Docker Composes' new includes feature that helps you separate your various app parts into separate files.

Glad you're here, and I'll see ya next week 👋