Stripe Is My DNS Provider Now: When Bad Ideas Meet Good APIs
I've always believed the best way to really understand a technology is to push it in stupid, impractical directions and see what breaks. Inspired by Corey Quinn's claim that Amazon Route 53 is actually a database, I wondered: what's the opposite of that? If DNS can be used as a database, what's the most absurd way to implement a DNS server?
In this talk, we'll explore a project born from that curiosity: using Stripe metadata as the datastore for a fully functional DNS server.
We'll dive into the mechanics of Stripe's metadata feature - normally used for linking internal IDs - and see how far we can stretch it. We'll look at how to coerce a simple key-value store into handling structured DNS records, the challenges of latency and rate limits, and the sheer joy of building something completely useless but technically fascinating.
While it seems like (and is!) a trivial idea, experiments like this can teach us a lot about designing robust systems. Whether it's Victorian railway arches being repurposed as artisanal coffee shops, or Google Sheets being called into service as a production database DB and API on the busiest traffic night of the year, robust and well-designed systems can open up use cases far beyond their architect's original imagination!
Expect a fun, lighthearted session that proves you can learn a lot about API design and infrastructure by building things that absolutely should not exist.
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Paul demonstrated an ingenious experiment - using Stripe's metadata system as a DNS server. While admittedly impractical, the exercise revealed valuable insights about API design and system architecture. Well-designed, robust APIs enable use cases far beyond their original intent. [..] Hands-on experimentation teaches you more about system constraints than documentation alone. His point about Victorian railway bridges resonated: they were built so robustly that 150 years later, they support uses their creators never imagined. That's the mark of great architecture.
One story amazed me: Paul Conroy shared how Stripe, a payments platform, was used as the backend for a DNS server. Clever, unusual, and a little absurd—but it worked 😲. It reminded me that APIs are flexible, yet knowing their limits is essential to avoid performance issues. It also highlighted the importance of careful design and understanding trade offs when pushing systems beyond their intended use.
It’s certainly one of my fav talks so far !
It was a very well put together concept in an easy to understand way [..] I was there straight after my classes since the whole day and it felt really engaging even then :)