I had the CEO and CTO of our ccTLD registry give a guest lecture to my CS students, and one question came up regarding the AWS incident. Prior to the question,

I had the CEO and CTO of our ccTLD registry give a guest lecture to my CS students, and one question came up regarding the AWS incident. Prior to the question, the CEO boasted a 100% uptime (not just five nines), and the CTO said “We’re basically 30 people maintaining a 1GB text file.” So the question was, “How come 30 people can have 100% uptime, and the biggest cloud with all of its expertise can’t? Sure, it was DNS, but are you even doing the same thing?” And the answer was, (paraphrasing) “No, what we do is simple. They use DNS to solve all sorts of distributed problems.” As did the CTO with all of these new record types embedding authentication. But running CoreDNS in a Kubernetes megacluster is not “maintaining a 1GB text file”.