Simon Painter Blog

In January 2024 I was at an AWS event and found myself talking to one of the product managers.

I hit a Cloudflare authorisation error while creating a redirect ruleset in Terraform.

DNS sits at the heart of every internet transaction, translating human-readable domain names into the IP addresses that actually route traffic.

Azure Virtual Network Routing Appliance has moved from awkward public preview to general availability.

Route Maps for Azure Route Server is now in public preview.

If you create a private endpoint for an Azure storage account and then poke at the DNS, you'll notice something that looks like a loose end.

Azure DNS Private Resolver has a documented limit that reads like a feature: two DNS forwarding rulesets per outbound endpoint.

When people say "dynamic DNS", they often mean two different things.

A like-minded colleague and I used to look at network topologies and ask one simple question.

Most teams building agent integrations are still wiring point to point URLs, API docs, and trust assumptions by hand.

Azure VPN Gateway has supported site-to-site connections with pre-shared keys for years.

I had one of those mildly awkward moments that only bloggers and other people who publish opinions on the internet seem able to engineer for themselves.

I use the .github/copilot-instructions.md file to keep writing style steady across posts, docs, and code comments.

I've spent some time helping organisations move their DNS infrastructure from legacy on-premises Active Directory (AD) DNS to modern hybrid cloud environments.

My journey with AI tools has followed a pattern I've seen before with Microsoft: someone builds something useful, then Microsoft makes it native to where you already work.

I use ping a lot, but milliseconds can hide the detail I care about.

The CNAME (Canonical Name) record is one of the most straightforward DNS record types in concept: it creates an alias for a domain name.

I saw a clever little tool on LinkedIn the other week.

There's a draft Internet-Draft floating around called "IPv8" by Jamie Thain.

I've always been more interested in the plumbing of the internet than the web pages sitting on top of it.