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The WebWell Podcast - DNS, Caching, and CDNs... Oh my!! Joined by Stephen Brewer
40 Plays6 months ago
In this milestone episode of the WebWell podcast, Simon Hartt and Ben McKinley welcome back their colleague and DNS expert, Stephen Brewer. Celebrating our 20th episode, we’re switching gears to deliver a concise yet comprehensive guide on DNS, aiming to demystify this crucial component of the internet.
Stephen kicks off with an introduction to key terms like caching, CDN, and DNS, using relatable analogies to break down these complex concepts. We delve into the importance of DNS for web functionality, usability, and security, discussing how it impacts everything from website performance to user experience.
Ben and Stephen share insights into Cloudflare’s role in enhancing DNS efficiency, security features, and overall reliability. We also explore the challenges and solutions related to DNS management, highlighting the benefits of using modern tools to optimize web performance.
Tune in to gain a deeper understanding of DNS and learn practical tips to manage it effectively for your websites. This episode is packed with valuable information for both tech enthusiasts and professionals alike.
We'd love to know what you think!! Please send your questions or comments to webwell@cascadewebdev.com We look forward to hearing from you!
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Transcript
Introduction to DNS, Caching, and CDNs
00:00:08
Speaker
the following episode was recorded to help explain and kind of provide some human translation for concepts like DNS and caching and CDNs. And as such, we mentioned Cloudflare several times and we just kind of wanted to pop this on to the beginning of the video to acknowledge what we hope to be some temporary but correctable issues with some of the business practices ah that came out after we recorded it about Cloudflare.
Kicking Off Episode 20
00:00:38
Speaker
Technology moves fast.
00:00:40
Speaker
Welcome, everyone, to the Web Well Podcast, special episode for us. This is episode 20. So we're we're changing things up a little, but I am Simon Hart. I'm joined here with Ben McKinley. And today we're welcoming back our special guest and coworker friend, Stefan Brewer. Welcome.
Simplifying DNS for Clients
00:01:00
Speaker
Good afternoon, gentlemen. Yeah, I think I'm very excited. You know, we had a and a strategic review of of the podcast over the of the last year, kind of some of the things that we learned. And we're going to try something a little different today. One, we're going to work to condense our podcast duration from an hour to about half that. And number two, while it's not always the ah the most exciting topic, it's so critical to the work we do, and that is around DNS. We've been trying to explain to our co-workers and our clients and their partners for the 23 and a half years we've been in business what it is and why it matters. And and so this is going to be one of those evergreen pieces of of content that we can refer all of those folks to in the future, perhaps you, and and also share some some tools we're using now that is making this this whole interaction with DNS so much more efficient than it's been
Caching Explained with Analogies
00:01:55
Speaker
to date. so
00:01:56
Speaker
With that, I'd love to hand this over to Stefan and let him kick this off and and head us down this path. Stefan? Cool. cool so Before we start, I just wanted to define some some kind of key terms because as you talk about some of this stuff, I think traditionally when we attempt to talk about it with a lot of people, it gets confusing. um the first The first term to kind of understand as we go through this is caching. And I think almost everybody has heard by now will clear your cash. And so cashing, we would like to speak in analogies. And so one a of the good one ah for this would be, if you've got a friend and you ask them the weather, how how's the weather out there today? And maybe they've got a friend who's a weatherman.
00:02:49
Speaker
And so they've already talked to their friends. They know what the weather's gonna be today and they're telling you. And so at that point, your friend is is kind of the cash. And so 10 other people can go to your friend and ask about that. And they're gonna right off the bat, just tell you tell those 10 people what the weather's gonna be today. They've already talked to the expert. They've got that source of truth behind them and and that's it. Otherwise, you would have all 10 of those people going directly to the weatherman and calling them up and asking them what the weather is going to be. and so Caching is is basically keeping some information and distributing it from one place instead of everybody going back to the source every time because at some point that source is going to be overworked and slow.
00:03:36
Speaker
The second term is CDN, um content delivery network.
Understanding CDNs
00:03:43
Speaker
And that is something that the closest analogy I can think of is really how the Amazon kind of warehouse and and delivery network works. um Back in the old days, if you order something online, you might be getting it, you know, you ordered in Portland and you have to wait for it to come from somewhere in, you know, Southern Florida. and that's going to take a bit. Now, the way Amazon works is you order it. There is generally going to be a fairly local warehouse and then somebody is going to jump in their delivery truck and deliver it to you from that local warehouse. And so instead of taking you know a week and a half, two weeks to get something, it takes you literally a lot of times less than 24 hours. And so that's that's kind of a CDN. Obviously a CDN is is like that with
00:04:32
Speaker
with ah you know images, PDFs, even HTML, things like that. Third term, challenging term is is DNS. And as as Ben said, this is something as a concept that is extremely important, yet it's been it's been difficult to explain that to people for 23 years. And really, it's it's actually really simple. It's like a phone book. um When you want to call somebody, well, now you just click their name on your phone, you call them. But back in the day, you had to you had to memorize phone numbers. And so ideally, you needed some kind of a phone book, at least, so you could go into the phone book and have a place to associate Ben McKinley with his phone number to call him. um DNS is is extremely similar because every website you visit has got an IP address that's actually the website, and you don't want to remember those IP addresses.
Deep Dive into DNS and IP Addresses
00:05:33
Speaker
Excellent. Well, hey, Stefan, real quick question. um I'm admitting some confusion on my part in that I was under the impression DNS stood for domain name servers. Is that correct A and B with the IP addresses? are those a Is that a collection of numbers, letters? But what what might someone see if they saw an IP address? So first question, DNS is domain name system, ah not to be confused with name servers. So DNS generally is a system of name servers. So a name server is a computer that's that's kind of contributing, it's it's one of the phone books essentially is a name server, but the system overall DNS is is domain name system. um I'm sorry, what was the second question?
00:06:24
Speaker
Second one was IP address. I mean, we throw those around a lot, but I just, you know, if someone were to see that, what might they what might they experience? It's going to be generally, depending on which which version of, of you know if it's IPv4 or IPv6, it's going to generally be IPv4 and that's going to be eight to 12 numbers. So, 198.161.1.1 is default, your kind of internal IP address and nothing anybody wants to remember for every website they go to for sure. And then if they're IPv6,
00:06:56
Speaker
That's a whole different ball game, and it's 20 or 30 characters or more, not even just numbers. And so with that, if I were to type an IP address into a um into a web browser, would i would I be directed to the website, or does it need that translation at the DNS level? Depending on the on the server setup, you will you will sometimes get to the website. if a If there's a true dedicated server and it's got um you know a single IP address associated with the site, you type in that IP address, you're probably going to get to the website.
DNS: Usability, Security, and Client Issues
00:07:31
Speaker
That's that's actually a trick I used to use way back in the day.
00:07:34
Speaker
When websites would get too busy and I was trying to order concert tickets or something, um I would go directly to the IP address and and turn HTTPS or or you know turn that on or off. and A lot of times I could actually get what I was trying to get that way because I was going in a different door, so to speak, there than the rest of the traffic. Interesting. Okay, cool. So Stefan, ah speaking of DNS and following up with ah Ben's question, why why is DNS um essential like as a ah a web functionality? Why is it so key ah to have that all set up and locked down for for like our customers, for example? Yeah, so there's there's a lot of different aspects to that. The first one, obviously, is just usability.
00:08:18
Speaker
um I can generally remember my own phone number, and that's about it, much less everybody else's. And so I don't think the web would really exist in the state it is today if we all had to remember you know eight-digit, 12-digit IP addresses going to those. um So really, it's just ease of use and reducing that complexity. But then there's also increasingly, thankfully, there's security implementations that come with DNS to make things a little bit more secure. um But essentially, when it really comes down to it, it's just reducing that complexity and making it easier to use the web. one of the One of the issues I think we've had lately over the last year or so with clients too is um clients knowing who controls their DNS. So I think a good tip and I think you could
00:09:03
Speaker
maybe back this up would be knowing who actually has access to your DNS. um Who's the admin? What are the login? What are the credentials? Just because if your site randomly goes down, it may potentially not be your web development team's fault. It may be actually linked to your DNS. and Maybe you could speak to some of those measures ah that a lot of clients or listeners in this case may want to take. Yeah, for sure. So it's funny, again, this is one of those topics where it just sounds so dry when when you come up on it, but it's it's so so critically important. um I guess along with usability, as you're pointing out, there's stability issues there. If your DNS provider has issues, it's not going to make it past that point. and And we've had several very large clients very large clients suffer a lot of downtime because of DNS.
00:09:58
Speaker
um And then I guess it it impacts performance as well, because this is kind of the first place that your user actually goes. They don't know it, but when your user requests your website, the first thing that happens is your computer browser goes out and and this is making a long story short, but it goes to that phone book and says, what's the number? And so if if that that phone book isn't working, It never gets a number. And that that happens, unfortunately, a lot. um And then on top of that, you want that phone book to be fast. And so the the better, you know the more performance your name servers are, the better. And and also the closest the closer they are geographically. Oh, OK.
00:10:45
Speaker
And I know lately, um we've been kind of relooking at even the services that we both offer, but also our third party you know softwares that we actually work with. um You want to talk a little about Cloudflare, as that seems to be really top topic ah lately, internally for us. Yeah. Yeah. So that's that's something we're we're starting to push for externally. and And internally, we're making a lot of switches already.
Cloudflare's Role in DNS Efficiency
00:11:16
Speaker
Like I said, it matters geographically how close that name server is to you. So if you're requesting a site and the name server is just one box you know somewhere halfway across the country, it's going to take a minute for that request to not literally a minute it's going to take sessions for that hopefully for that request to get all the way to the name server and then the answer to get all the way back to you.
00:11:41
Speaker
um Cloudflare certainly isn't the first to do this, but they're increasingly one of the best where they've got ah something like 300 servers around the world. So chances are pretty good that you're going to get a name server that is located fairly close to you. And so instead of 20 hops to a name server, hopefully you'll get you know five or six. um I'm making those numbers up. I have no idea how relevant those are, but the idea is you will get you get a lot closer of to connection using something that's got a network of name servers rather than just a couple sitting somewhere. i assume that and and Also, it's it's worth mentioning to your point, sorry, to another point you brought up is just
00:12:28
Speaker
simply knowing who your provider is. you know We have a lot of clients who, their domain registrar is one company, their DNS or their name servers are a different company, and then they have us host the site. And so there's a lot of chefs in that kitchen, and it's really easy to get mixed up. It's it's funny how big of a part of a project it is when we go to launch, simply coordinating all those things, finding somebody who knows what service they're using. And most of the time, we can help them identify those services. um But it it gets to be a challenge to track down access to all of those services. Your your old IT manager that hasn't worked there in two years you know has got access. and And so we have to track that down. So Cloudflare, again, gives us a way to deal with some of this stuff where we can we can kind of help them set up a one system for for those jobs.
Why CDNs Matter
00:13:20
Speaker
We did define a CDN, ah so we kind of have an idea of at least its definition and potentially some of how it works, but maybe ah we can shift gears and go over to why is it essential for like a modern web experience to have a ah good CDN in place. So CDN, a content delivery network, it really functions again, kind of like ah an Amazon warehouse. so Back in the day, you set up your web server, every image on your site, every document on your site was all hosted on that web server. And that web server, again, it may be in the state you are or it may be all the way across the country. And so how fast that site
00:14:05
Speaker
fulfills your request depends on how fast the server is and and how close to you it is physically. And so the better way to do that is to have a CDN that that again, like like the distributed system for for name servers, has servers in different locations so you can get one that's geographically closer to you and it takes less time and that that CDN is also hopefully optimized to deliver that content to you. So bottom line, instead of instead of requesting an image from you know all the way across the country,
00:14:43
Speaker
using a CDN, you're likely to be requesting that that image from you know somewhere in in in your state or fairly close to it that's going to get back to your browser a lot faster and and hopefully be optimized ah in the way that it hits your browser window. Stefan, real quick on CDNs. So with CDNs, that i mean when we were first started doing this, and for a number of years, we would host all of the assets on the same server as the website itself. So maybe talk about how we're distributing some of those responsibilities and the benefits that come from that, ah both for the the owner of a specific website, but but also potentially for owners of of websites on partition servers where there there are perhaps more calls made.
00:15:25
Speaker
Yeah, yeah it's ah that's an easy one because it's it's just so so essential at this point. um the more traffic a website gets, you know obviously the more the the greater the number of requests going into that, and the more of the assets they're hosting directly on that server, the more work that server has to do, the more it slows down after a while. And so we'd we made the switch for sites a number of years ago to start hosting assets on on Amazon Web Services, on S3 specifically as their service, and then it goes to a Cloudflare CDN.
00:16:00
Speaker
So that if you hit a page that has 30 images, you're not making, you know, 31 requests, you know, the page plus those 30 images, plus some cascading style sheets, plus some JavaScript. You're making ideally one request of that web server and the rest of them are kind of outsourced to the CDN that is, as mentioned before, hopefully geographically
Cloudflare's CDN Advantages
00:16:25
Speaker
closer to you. So you're, You're lightening the server load, which helps the server perform better and and perform better for more requests. And you're getting you're getting a lot of the content that would be the heavy part of the workload in know in a more optimized format for you. and
00:16:41
Speaker
Yeah, that's helpful. That's helpful. and And I can imagine that helps you in terms of ah not only um you know asking less of those servers, but then if there is an issue, your ability to target where the problem is and solve that that one issue as compared to the days when everything was hosted on one server. In fact, DNS perhaps. And so when things would go down, they'd go down, they'd make it for a real bad day for you. Yeah, yeah. A side note is what what Ben is tiptoeing around is in in the first year or so of our existence, we had one server that hosted everything, everything. um It hosted, it was the name server, it was the web server, it served the assets, and I believe it served email for a number of servers, for a number of clients. And that that did go down at one point. and And there are some great stories behind that that involve CB radios and ah generous clients of ours that helped us get back on our feet really quick.
00:17:36
Speaker
So yeah, that definitely helps with that. So when when something goes down, it's it's partitioned out. And fortunately with with you know larger CDNs like that, you don't really come across true downtime as much, at least for that part of it. So they've they've got things that are so distributed and there's so many systems involved, there's so much redundancy that knock on wood, you don't actually see the CDNs go down that often at all. Well, I know we've talked about Cloudflare um quite a few times, and we're going to keep doing it through all this. But um specifically, maybe what are some of the key features with ah their their CDN services you know that maybe will help from avoiding some of those pitfalls?
00:18:24
Speaker
So this is something that we're we're still kind of testing and exploring. Again, right now we're using a lot of AWS for this stuff. We're using S3 as kind of their object storage and CloudFront. Oddly enough, is there is there CDN. um CloudFlare, we're taking a very close look at those because again, consolidating some of the services, there're their rates are different, but very competitive with Amazon Web Services. and so They do a lot of the same things. They don't do as much, but that actually is kind of an advantage. that that A lot of the complexity is reduced. um Again, the pricing is similar, but it's it's something that we're still kind of crunching the numbers on.
Types of Caching
00:19:08
Speaker
ah but
00:19:10
Speaker
The way it works, again, you know they've got they've got a great network, again, 300-ish ah servers around the world. And so that's that geographic ah issue is is very well addressed by them. um They do, I guess, technically a little more in terms of delivering optimized content, potentially, depending on the configuration, ah with Amazon Web Service. The complexity is is pretty crazy. um You can make a very good living on just helping companies navigate Amazon Web Services.
00:19:48
Speaker
um With Cloudflare, again, it's just a lot more simple. And so with their CDN, you it's ah a lot more click and drag, and you're delivering for their CDN. So they're delivering your images back to you in that optimized format from a server that's close by. And and then you've take this you into security stuff ah that goes hand in hand with that. it's ah It's a pretty seductive deal. Well, I know, i at least in our notes, I skipped ah one little chunk, I think, ah in the order of things. We were looking at cash caching first. ah But cache, maybe we can go back and talk about some of that as well. So types of caching. um Can you explain some of the differences, such as browser? I'm going to edit that out.
00:20:37
Speaker
browser caching, server casting, ah database caching, application caching, right? What are some of those differences there? Yeah, so depending on which way you want to work from, um there's just multiple, multiple levels of caching that come into place. And again, this is this is instead of everybody going to one source to ask a question, there's kind of this cascading a series of of places where you go to everybody goes to this one thing and asks. And it really starts when you make the request from your browser with your browser. So you request a website, if you've already questioned it before,
00:21:15
Speaker
your browser may not have to do anything. Depending on the configuration of the site, your browser may just say, hey, I remember this content. I'm going to give it to you. So it doesn't go any further than that. Depending on the configuration, um if there's if there's going to be more fresh content, you're instead of relying on your browser cache, you're going to go back and you're going to look at the next thing in line, which is that CDN. And so the CDN is going to give you a ah cache version of that wood that they have.
Caching for Performance Optimization
00:21:41
Speaker
um go backwards from there and there's there's some server caching going on or application caching where the server and or the application are going to be giving you you know the last version of things that they remember. And again, this is all very, very configurable and making a lot of very complex things simple all the way down to to the database, which is generally where all the content is really coming from from your website. And so there's ways of even at that that base level
00:22:08
Speaker
of the database saying, hey, don't come back to me for this for an hour. Just get it right here. um So it's it's ideally it's level on level of caching that starts with your browser and ends with with a bunch of stuff on the server itself. And I know i I think ultimately I get the answer to this, but what are some of the main benefits of caching? Speed. Mostly it's it's performance and cutting down on on the the load really that the server needs to do. Because obviously if your browser knows, hey, there's nothing new, I don't need to go back to the server, I'm just gonna give you what I got. That's allowing either the CDN to serve more without making decisions or the the server to serve more more requests without having to do anything.
00:22:55
Speaker
And I imagine that overall experience for the user when they approach the site for the first time or as a repeated ah visitor is vastly improved too because of that experience. yeah Yeah. And again, again i mean using this is another another thing that c Cloudflare comes into play, and we've done a little bit of testing here. A user can request your site for the first time, and depending on the setup, it may never go back to your your web server, or your origin server. if If your CDN like Cloudflare or something already knows, hey, I've already served this content to somebody, it hasn't changed,
00:23:33
Speaker
I'm just going to give them the content from the CDN, from from the cache of the CDN, instead of going back and even checking with the web server. We're seeing and testing pretty frequently that the request will come in and never actually make it back to the server at all. and that's with With CloudFlare, um there's there's a lot of cool things in place there because a lot of questions come up there. What if there is new content? out What pages might have new content that other pages don't? How do you deal with that stuff? What what if um this person is is logging into a more dynamic part of the site than this other person? How do we tell them to go back to the server and look for new content?
00:24:14
Speaker
And again, Cloudflare's got some some very cool tools to accomplish that. um Again, compared to Amazon Web Services, so does Amazon. But digging them up and configuring them are quite a different exercise. Wow. Okay. Do caches ever get too full? I mean, if it's sitting there storing this data, I just imagine it's like a completely other server on top of server, right? So you you kind of talked about all the layers of potential caching. what happens when they get full? They purge themselves. It really depends on the configuration of the of the server, but um the the type of of servers that we're talking about, at least on that at the CDN level, are built in such a way and they're so huge that it's frankly not something we have to worry about. But generally the way caches work is is everything that's cached has some kind of a TTL or time to live.
00:25:08
Speaker
And so it kind of has an expiration date. um And if ah if something gets full and nothing's expired theoretically, it just starts cleaning itself out and starting back at the beginning and says, delete you know delete the oldest thing and make room for the newer stuff.
DNS Management Flexibility with Cloudflare
00:25:27
Speaker
Well, hey, i'm jumping back, I know we're kind of bouncing around on these topics a little bit, but obviously they're very intimately and involved with each other. um Maybe talk a little bit about the the ways in which Cloudflare is making it a lot easier for us to partner with other service providers related you know to our clients. I know recently one of our long-term clients had asked us to help them consolidate their domain names
00:25:51
Speaker
and the DNS and all of these things. And so we moved forward with that and had lost sight of the fact that um previously we had been referred to this client by their IT partners and they got back to us and said, whoa, whoa, whoa, we're, we're you know, We're going to go ahead and and move the registration for the domain name. We're going to change DNS like we want, we need this part, but we don't want that part. And it was a really interesting evaluation of how can we collectively best serve this client. And and it seemed like CloudFlare put us in a better position than we've ever been in before to allow them to own what they wanted.
00:26:28
Speaker
and us to manage services that we were comfortable with the responsibility owning and being in a position that when there are trouble when there are problems that we can we can all be supportive of that client's needs. But it might be worth kind of breaking that down a little bit, because I know we've gotten some interesting responses sometimes from technical partners that are are supporting web services for clients that we're you know both supporting. Yeah, so it has been a challenge for a number of years. um Who is in charge of DNS? Who has access to DNS? and A lot of times, it's what happens if we, as your web host, need to do something as simple as change the IP address that your site is pointing to. you know A server blows up. We want to change the IP address to to cut it over to a new box.
00:27:18
Speaker
how do we do that? and The unfortunate answer is really it's been either we've got control of it at the DNS level or you the client do. um and there are There are a number of clients who have given us that control just because we've They've been clients for so so many number of years and and there's that trust there. But for newer clients or for you know larger clients with with ah IT departments and and just more complex needs, handing us the keys to that is is not necessarily an acceptable answer. And so what we're finding is that with Cloudflare, we can delegate that account access either way. And so in that particular case, if I remember right, we ended up um
00:28:05
Speaker
basically giving them access to modify DNS as they needed under our account. So their IT, the concern was, hey, if if we need it, it was the same as ours. If we need to change something for you know the Exchange servers are running for this client, We don't want to have to go to you and do this. um you you know I don't particularly love the idea of getting a call at 2 o'clock in the morning on a Saturday to to change some IP addresses and DNS records either.
DNS Management Challenges and Solutions
00:28:35
Speaker
and so The ability to delegate that IT team access to this specific
00:28:44
Speaker
dns or DNS for this specific domain was was fantastic. And we can do the other way around too where we have another client that we've had for for I think decades um and we we actually have access to the domains on their account. So so if a server blows up, we can we can get into their account really easily and and change the IP addresses that we need to there. Yeah, no, I think that's that's been great. I mean, ultimately what we're trying to do is is be that trusted advisor for our clients. and And it's always interesting when we come in or someone else comes in that's got a complimentary service that is so tied to security, that's so tired tied to disaster recovery. I know in the first example we were talking about and talking to the IT professionals, they're like, we don't wanna,
00:29:32
Speaker
We don't want to be the domain registrar, because boy, if that's allowed to to lapse, boy, the the the exposure we would face is is too great for our risk tolerance. It's like, oh, well, maybe we should reconsider. But we do offer that service. We're here for it. And the ability to kind of create barriers where we need to, but create access where we need to and have everyone feel like, great, I'm not having to give up more than I want to for that edge case where I need that immediate access, but also not being asked to take on more responsibility than I'm comfortable taking on. It's just been really really nice to see that those those options considered and delivered by Cloudflare.
00:30:14
Speaker
So yeah, Simon, did you have some thoughts here as we're, I know we're getting a little bit close to the the end of of our time together. Yeah, I think i I really just wanted to wrap up with maybe just some of the highlights of security. So like, as you alluded to specific to that, um Stefan, if you want to close with maybe some of those and then ah we can wrap up. um and Again, it's sounding like such an infomercial, but it's something that that we're really stoked on because it's solving it solving problems that we've had for the duration of the company, which again, you know we're we're coming up in 24 years now. um so to To start solving problems we've had you know in that amount of time, is it's exciting. um and Security is is always, it's just one of these things that's ever evolving and problematic and complex. and The answer really here is just,
00:31:04
Speaker
the wonder at at being able to start security before everything connects to our web servers. um So in in depending on the configuration, um there' there's an option for proxying connections. And so when somebody goes to connect to your site, they're connecting through Cloudflare. And so there's a number of things that come and come into play there. um they can, you can turn on a web application firewall at the Cloudflare level. um Cloudflare is filtering requests at the DNS level. So if there's a, and we've we've actually, we've run into the wrong side of this ourselves.
00:31:44
Speaker
So some of us use a VPN currently that's on a system, um a provider I should say that apparently has fallen out of favor with some filtering. And so we'll we'll go to go to websites and we'll get we'll get this little thing that basically doesn't let us in or makes us prove we're human. um and that's Cloudflare generally. and so it's the Some of the bad traffic isn't even making it ever to our servers. um so They're taking care of that that you know that web application need or web application firewall need before it even gets to filtering out SQL injections and all kinds of nasty things um and DDoS present protection. so
00:32:27
Speaker
I think everybody by now, I hopefully don't have to define the term, but ah distributed denial of service basically when any number of computers start sending bad requests ah to to your web server just to overwhelm it. To have that taken care of at the DNS level is pretty amazing. um and then Just one more thing to to help us sleep better at night you know because it is it is something that happens. and so to have To have a good solid answer to that is neat.
Cloudflare's Security Features and Conclusion
00:32:57
Speaker
They also take care of ah
00:33:00
Speaker
um SSL certificates at this point themselves, which is something we're still kind of navigating because there are there are some great solutions out there for SSL now to where you don't have to pay an arm and a leg like you used to. um But now we've got another solution in Cloudflare that we can we can utilize to to take care of that without ah any extra costs or complexity at all. Man, well that's that's really exciting. i mean At the end of the day, the topic itself is not one that just sizzles, but I can tell you, given the number of of service providers we used to rely upon to provide reliable service to our clients and to collaborate with other complimentary service providers for that,
00:33:41
Speaker
um you know, and and just being reliable. This is this has just been continued good news. So, you know, at the risk of empowering competitors with this new little bit of special sauce we've identified. um I think it it just really highlights some some benefits for our clients and it makes us that much easier to to initially trust and to work with for those complimentary service providers that are doing IT services and the like. And I'm not sure people will clamor to this immediately as a hot topic, but certainly something that'll be an exciting resource for us to be able to share with those clients and service providers in the future where they're like, I need a crash course, great. Spend 30 minutes on your drive home, listen to this podcast, um you know gain some general awareness and who knows, in addition to see how this evolves and
00:34:28
Speaker
then we might have to do a recut just because things are moving so quickly. But Stefan, thanks for joining us and providing this insight for everybody. Cool. Thanks for having me. Thanks, guys.