[teddyh]

That looks very interesting, but, like SRV records have been studiously ignored in the past, I doubt that Google, Cloudflare, etc al. will allow this to be the norm, since this would eliminate much of the value proposition which Cloudflare has, and also partially drain the moat which Google has constructed around itself.

[tialaramex]

Maybe take another glance at the "very interesting" draft? Those named authors are from Google and one of Cloudflare's competitors, Akamai.

Of course you can imagine these are rogue actors off developing technology that's hostile to their employer's needs. But, like, Occam's razor. It seems simpler to assume that these outfits see improving the place where they make money (the web) as just good business.

[teddyh]

I’ll belive it when I see it. SRV has been around for ages, and the arguments given for not using SRV in HTTP/2, QUIC etc. have been weak and unconvincing, despite its obvious benefits.

[amluto]

I can’t fathom why CloudFlare world dislike this. To the contrary:

> They also enable aliasing of apex domains, which is not possible with CNAME.

That would help eliminate a major annoyance of using a CDN.

[teddyh]

If this draft RFC keeps the “priority” and “weight” features from SRV, it also means that most people would’t actually need a CDN.

[amluto]

If clients could assist in load-balancing, it might be handy, but large web hosts would still need a lot of nodes, a lot of bandwidth, DoS mitigation and, ideally, a way to get clients to use a local point of presence. In other words, people would still want most of the services that CloudFlare provides.

[teddyh]

> large web hosts would still need

> a lot of nodes,

Not that many, say three or four servers at most should IMHO be fine for the vast majority.

> a lot of bandwidth,

If your service gets popular enough that you need that much bandwidth, you can then very likely get enough funds to get adequate bandwidth. (Either by commercializing or by donations.)

> DoS mitigation

If you have four servers on four different networks, how hard would someone have to DoS them all before all four give out? And, maybe at least one of those four servers are placed on an ISP which is actually somewhat competent in helping you to filter out DoS traffic? Cloudflare doesn’t have some secret magic sauce, you know.

> and, ideally, a way to get clients to use a local point of presence.

That’s technically true, but only if you are desperate for your latency enough to merit such needs. But you probably aren’t. You are, most likely, much more served by optimizing your server caching and HTML page code than you would be by trying to claw a few extra milliseconds out of the network itself.

If you are desperate to get a few extra milliseconds, and already have a dead-simple homepage, and are enormously popular enough to merit it, then you are Google, and you can solve this problem by means not available to mere mortals.

I have written before in more detail why Google et al. probably doesn’t want SRV records: (In short, SRV solves problems for other people which Google have already solved for themselves, and Google would like to keep their moat.)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15906664#15908696

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8549348#8550133