The Secret Story Behind Cloudflare's Ninja-Themed Name Servers
What's the story behind the names of Cloudflare's name servers? (2013)
I explain the playful logic behind naming our DNS servers after ninjas, blending pop culture references with technical functionality. This naming convention reflects our team's passion for stealth and speed while creating a unique identity for our global network infrastructure.
We wanted names that were short, memorable, and reflected the stealth and speed of our network, so ninjas were the perfect fit.
- pelagicAustral
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.
- majke
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.
- cynicalsecurity
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.
- bantunes
"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.
- TimByte
A surprising amount of infrastructure design seems to be hiding patterns that humans will otherwise turn into unsupported features