[apitman]

Big providers have more resources than anyone when it comes to having their servers close to users and optimizing performance. They can afford things like AnyCast networks and custom DNS servers for things like Geo routing. Just because they don't doesn't mean they can't.

> you can't put everything into one domain because of performance bottlenecks

What specifically are you referring to here?

[jiggawatts]

If you look at my original comment in this thread, I mentioned that to log in to something like Microsoft 365 via Azure Entra ID, the browser has to connect to a bunch of distinct DNS domains. About half of these are CDNs serving the JavaScript, images, etc... For example, customers can upload their own corporate logos and wallpapers and that has to be served up.

Just about every aspect of a CDN is very different to an IdP server. A CDN is large volumes of static content, not-security-critical, slowly changing, etc... Conversely the API is security-critical, can't be securely served "from the edge", needs rapid software changes when vulnerabilities are found, etc...

So providers split them such that the bulk of the traffic goes to a CDN-only domain distributed out to cache boxes in third-party telco sites and the OAuth protocol goes to an application server hosted in a small number of secure data centres.

To the end user this means that now the browser needs at least two HTTPS connections, with DNS lookups (including CDN CNAME chasing!), TCP 3-way handshake, HTTPS protocol negotiation, etc...

This also can't be efficiently done as some sort of pre-flight thing in the browser either because it's all served from different domains and is IdP-controlled. If I click on some "myapp.com" and it redirects to "login.idp.com" then it's that page that tells the browser to go to "cdn.idp.com" to retrieve the JavaScript or whatever that's needed to process the login.

It's all sequential steps, each one of which bounces around the planet looking up DNS or whatnot.

"It's fast for me!" says the developer sitting in the same city as both their servers and the IdP, connected on gigabit fibre.

Try this flow from Australia and see how fast it is.