Stripe Is My DNS Provider Now: When Good APIs Meet Bad Ideas

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.

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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