5 ms·
Just to add to the discussion -- 'whats happening in the background' -- more specifically is your operating system's stub resolver. So when you ask for www.ama
by LogicX 6y ago
Just to add to the discussion -- 'whats happening in the background' -- more specifically is your operating system's stub resolver.
So when you ask for www.amazon.com it ends up making multiple DNS lookups, as www.amazon.com is a CNAME record.
Nothing about this CNAME lookup gets passed back up the stack to your application; you just get that end-result: the IP address.
host www.amazon.com
www.amazon.com is an alias for tp.47cf2c8c9-frontier.amazon.com.
tp.47cf2c8c9-frontier.amazon.com is an alias for www.amazon.com.edgekey.net.
www.amazon.com.edgekey.net is an alias for e15316.e22.akamaiedge.net.
e15316.e22.akamaiedge.net has address 23.204.68.114
- chrisweekly 6y agoAm I the only one who finds it strange that Amazon uses Akamai instead of Cloudfront?
- _jal 6y agoWhy is that? (My first thought was, wow, surprised they outsource that.)
- blyry 6y agoPure speculation, but probably the same reason they ran Oracle for so long -- not many cdn providers when amazon.com launched. Afaik akamai still has one of the biggest edge networks of all the providers.
- Legogris 6y agoI'd wager at least part of it is the same reason many companies use CloudFront: Separate point of failure in case of downtime at the AWS side, some one else shouldering DDoS.
- MaxBarraclough 6y agoI asked the same question 7 days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23537135 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23537135
- forbiddenlake 6y agoIt varies. For example, for www.amazon.com, I get www.amazon.com -> tp.47cf2c8c9-frontier.amazon.com. -> d3ag4hukkh62yn.cloudfront.net.