Just to avoid the possibility of re-inventing the wheel how much of this idea is covered by systems like CORBA (1991, now mostly obsolete tho latest release was 2014), X.500, and LDAP (a simplified subset of X.500)? And Microsoft's Active Directory? Or logical extensions thereof (where is ____?) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_Object_Request_Broker_Architecture https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X.500 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lightweight_Directory_Access_Protocol https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Active_Directory or the various "See Also" on those wikipedia pages (Apple Open Directory, etc etc etc)? And I guess URIs/URLs in general? There's a rich history of people throwing themselves against this idea of locating objects in a network, particularly at a generic level (where is a printer I can use which does two-sided color printing and is at least 20ppm? Or a game server for <GAME> or whatever.) Also, the CDNs like Akamai dabble in this more than a little. Geoff Houston had a great article in a recent "Internet Protocol Journal" (May 2025, V28.1), "The IPv6 Transition", which goes way beyond what the title might imply and talks about how between NAT, CGNAT, CDNs, DNS, and DDNS "this ain't yer grandparents internet anymore"...you'd have to read the article, it's only several pages long but I had several "oh yeah he's right" moments reading it. On October 25, 2025 at 14:27 karl@cavebear.com (Karl Auerbach) wrote:
In our internet naming system "host names" are synonyms for IP addresses which are labels on network interfaces on host machines.
In our evolving internet of applications - typically floating in a conceptual "cloud" - the binding between a specific instance of an application service and a host/network interface is something that is rather dynamic and changeable, even during the existence of a client-to-service session.
DNS is sort of becoming like MAC addresses - it is becoming less and less visible to users who are getting more used to dealing with other sorts of naming systems, often application specific naming systems.
DNS can well be (and usually ought to be) underneath. But DNS isn't designed for the kind of dynamics that can occur with the increased rates of user-to-service binding (and changes to those bindings) that are becoming more typical.
Much of the magic of DNS comes from caching. And caching is troublesome in a world where client and service relationships are potentially changeable, even within a few seconds.
I am not sure that any single higher-than-DNS name (or attribute) lookup system will be right for all applications, so we may end up with several of these higher level systems. This would largely be as visible to users as are the lookups inside AWS, Facebook, or other systems that are evolving their own notion of "names".
In the old ISO/OSI world they had a concept of "application titles" which are distinct from network addresses. But even that is perhaps too static for they way our internet is becoming more a world of pieces of code that may run in many places - or may be started or moved as loads and connectivity and location change.
--karl--
On 10/25/25 1:14 PM, bzs@theworld.com wrote:
On October 24, 2025 at 15:54 at-large@icann.org (Karl Auerbach via At-Large) wrote:
Oh, by-the-way, I don't mean, in the text below, that DNS is no longer usable. Rather than we need an additional naming system (perhaps based on attributes) that can lead to stable DNS names (thus obviating a need for the kind of short-lived DNS name-mapping juggling that goes on now.)
As has been oft said in computer science - and networking - one can solve many problems by adding an additional layer of indirection.
--karl--
Isn't that what host names are?
-- -Barry Shein Software Tool & Die | bzs@TheWorld.com | http://www.TheWorld.com Purveyors to the Trade | Voice: +1 617-STD-WRLD | 800-THE-WRLD The World: Since 1989 | A Public Information Utility | *oo*