What's the story behind the names of Cloudflare's name servers? (2013)

I started on a new team once and I was integrating some CloudFlare services, I hooked a domain name and I was assigned a nameserver with my lastname and one with my new manager's lastname... nobody ever believed I did not picked those, people still joke about a love story that involves a manager, myself and CloudFlare.

If you want to know more about the cache invalidation in the whole pipeline of DNS requests, take a look at this

https://blog.cloudflare.com/tld-glue-sticks-around-too-long/

I hinted there how the NS chain of lookups works from . to your domain. The point is that we wanted to be able to move name servers around the ip addresss, but that wouldn't work for many domains. So - in some contexts moving IP's rapidly is possible, in some it's not. Fun.

"Naming strategies for servers" seems like a big enough niche for there to exist a compendium somewhere already, but I couldn't find a good one.

There are 2 hard problems in computer science: naming things and cache invalidation. Cloudflare writes about how it deals with the first one.

As always https://xkcd.com/910/

Vatican server names sounded somewhat interesting too: Michael, Gabriel, and Raphael. They set up their own ISP and cloud hosting since then, but it was a funny gig they did in the past.

I love these kinds of stories.

> One side note on this point: we once had someone write in to support criticizing us based on the fact that our name server convention is hetro-normative. I will simply say that just because you get two name servers doesn't mean they're in any kind of relationship.

I mean, you could add 50 gender-neutral names to try to balance it out...

There are infinite genders though, so it's not really fair to go beyond that.

Just make it a uuid or some other kind of random a-z0-9 string to avoid all this whimsy and nuisance?

This is so cringe. I feel like software engineers are just overgrown toddlers stuck in kindergarten: "We named our servers with boy and girls names and hired an artist to draw their personalities as ninjas!!@!111". I mean, whats wrong with a plain old 4 character hash or whatever?