Sunday, April 7, 2013

Now on IPv6!

On a whim, I configured CloudFlare today.  Then happily discovered, it helps my site go into the future, and not just faster, but also with IPv6.  On a side note, since they'll be handling my name servers for the purposes as a CDN, I can eliminate my name server hosting costs, saving $12/year, unless I put those $12 towards premium features as the site grows.

But wait, there's more!


Looking at their apps, I found Blitz.io, which is a sweet simple load-testing service.  After testing it out a bit, I misspelled Brazil, and found this fun fact:


"s" isn't just British anymore
Hm, those regional mappings seem very familiar.  Quick to the bat-lookup (or bat-dig, your preference):

C:\>nslookup www.blitz.io
Server:  google-public-dns-b.google.com
Address:  8.8.4.4

Non-authoritative answer:
Name:    elb014717-1106725811.us-east-1.elb.amazonaws.com
Addresses:  54.243.112.187
          54.243.77.105
          54.243.229.217
Aliases:  www.blitz.io
          mie-8036.herokussl.com


Ha, I thought so.  It looks like they're using Heroku, who's a well know user of AWS.

That's not all, Bob.  Tell 'em what they've won!


When I first ran the query, I mistakenly specified the apex zone:

C:\>nslookup blitz.io
Server:  google-public-dns-b.google.com
Address:  8.8.4.4

Non-authoritative answer:
Name:    blitz.io
Address:  50.31.209.229


They aren't using the ELB in their apex zone.  I happen to know that feature is an AWS specific implementation of Route 53.  So let's check name servers:

C:\>nslookup -q=ns blitz.io
Server:  google-public-dns-b.google.com
Address:  8.8.4.4

Non-authoritative answer:
blitz.io        nameserver = ns4.dnsimple.com
blitz.io        nameserver = ns2.dnsimple.com
blitz.io        nameserver = ns3.dnsimple.com
blitz.io        nameserver = ns1.dnsimple.com


Yup, they're using name servers elsewhere.  But why not use CloudFlare for the optimizations?  Perhaps its something that only their engineers can answer.

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