Karl Auerbach wrote:
On 12/18/15 2:33 AM, Christian de Larrinaga wrote:
Actually DNS is not working for most of the Internet either, witness we don't have names resolving to the billions and approaching trillions of devices and applications services at the edge of data networks. I've never heard that claim before. I've run experiments with DNS and found surprisingly few limits on how far it can expand. (For example, in one experiment [more than a decade ago] we ran Bind with tens of millions of top level domains and then ran query traffic [in which we mixed a fair amount of absent names to make it more real-life.])
I'm intrigued. Was this done to establish evidence that a flattening of the hierarchy would not be a technical problem? Took about thirty years for that shift in architecture of DNS to come out of the cold. I am really referring to the scaling of DNS beyond server side hosts which are now largely in located in data centres to satisfy the need for persistent identifiers for all our devices and services. That has not happened using DNS registry business model as it has developed and managed at ICANN. I dare say it could have happened technically. But the business model doesn't work out to charge $10 or more per an for a device orientated name service. The DNS has been taken over by those using it as a pseudo business registration service. A role that the DNS is bound to fail in satisfying. Incidentally I am not knocking the work that Jon Postel and Paul Mockapetris started back in 82 ish and many others have done some amazing work on DNS which we all depend on today. But it seems to have gone as far as it can.
Sad fact is DNS designed in an era of big iron... DNS was designed in the mid 1980's, and the biggest of computers we had back then are overmatched even by rather small devices of today. The laptop I'm using to type this makes the Crays I used (for magnetic confinement fusion simulations) seem rather weak.
However, there is an intriguing side vector, which is that DNS is fading as a user-visible technology.
This does not mean that DNS is going to disappear, rather that it is being submerged to become an internal internet name/address technology. IP and MAC addresses used to be far more visible to users. They became submerged under DNS names. DNS is now following that path and being submerged under URI based names and application-local names (such as Facebook names, hashtags, Twitter handles, etc.) Even URI names that contain long DNS names and index data are being submerged under shortened names. I anticipate that attribute-based naming systems will come to dominate in certain areas (I am sure, however, that if one were to look inside such systems that DNS names will be there serving as internal machinery.)
I like your use of the word "submergence" of DNS. It is a great way to put it.
There is at least one of the new top level domain offerings that is based on the idea that this kind of DNS submergence is happening. It's (partial) focus is on DNS names used to located technical resources; the human semantics of the names is not particularly important because it isn't humans who are uttering those DNS names. On the other hand, because a flexible human has been supplanted by embedded firmware, the value of long term persistence of a DNS name is more important than cute words that such a name might contain.
Persistence and global reach of identifiers are critical qualities for many data applications. DNS is continuing to serve as a naming service in the sense of being submerged within a grander URI schema such as with Handles or other registries. But there is the likelihood of a different identifier model entirely appearing. There has been a lot of interesting work that might lead to persistent identifier routing for data objects or graphs of semantic links to give two examples. Both would be a move away from the "everything is a file" Unix metaphor to address content which can lie within and across many devices, even network boundaries. How far the DNS as it is currently structured can usefully serve in such an environment I don't know but it is likely to become increasingly "submerged" as you describe and I suspect increasingly routed around.
--karl--
Christian