Our commitment to Domain Management Automation

At DNSimple we truly believe in automation. After all, we're a small team, we work remotely from more than 5 countries and across several different timezones. We couldn't accomplish most of our tasks without the support of an automated infrastructure.

Tools like Chef, Puppet, Terraform, Ansible, and others, have improved the way operators provision systems. It's now possible to treat servers like a codebase and adopt common development best practices such as versioning, code review, and testing.

But this is just one example of automation—the tip of the iceberg. Thanks to APIs offered by many of the services we rely on, today you can use PackageCloud to automate the packaging and provisioning of a binary, use Travis CI to deploy a static site to Cloudfront, deploy your application from a chat bot, and so much more.

In the last few years the number of customers who trust DNSimple to automate their infrastructure has significantly increased. There is still a large portion of customers who prefer to manage their domains manually, but more and more customers are requesting the ability to automate their domain management processes.

We love this idea. We love to be able to be part of this ecosystem and continue to improve the way we support automation. We love it so much that we recently created a new tagline for it: Domain Management Automation.

In this post, I want to quickly explain what the phrase Domain Management Automation means for us, and for you as a customer.

Domain Management Automation is one of the new focuses of DNSimple. It is part of our vision of providing a comprehensive domain management platform you can integrate with, either directly working with our domain management API, or indirectly using add-ons developed by other developers.

Our commitment to Domain Automation means that:

• we want to make it possible to use all of the DNSimple core features via APIs
• we will develop, maintain, and improve our API and official API clients
• we will continue to investigate ways to support new tools. We already have integrations with various provisioning tools, and we do our best to keep them up to date

The release of DNSimple API v2 was the first step towards this direction, but there are still a few essential API methods we're missing. For instance, we're working hard to make it possible to request Let's Encrypt SSL certificates via our API. This is one of the most common requests we receive and, believe me, we can't wait for the day where you are be able to request and provision an SSL certificate using our chef cookbook, Terraform, Ansible, or any other provisioning tool.

For you, as a customer, choosing DNSimple for Domain Automation means you will get:

• a comprehensive and simple to use domain management API you can interact with to register, transfer, and manage your domains
• a full set of APIs to interact with a core set of domain services, such as SSL certificates, Whois Privacy, and email forwarding
• a set of API to manage the DNS hosting of your domains, including DNS management and secondary DNS

Additionally, we continue to invest resources and time to improve services directly connected with DNSimple. Here's a couple of examples:

• We provided a patch to Terraform to support the DNSimple API v2
• We provided a patch to upgrade LEGO and Caddy to API v2
• We released a brand new Chef DNSimple cookbook powered by our API v2
• We helped to move the fog module into fog-dnsimple and we are working to upgrade fog-dnsimple to the API v2

There are several internal projects connected to this effort: we're now actively looking into expanding our selection of supported domain names, and we are refreshing our whois privacy service. We're also working to be involved in additional development and technical communities by being present at conferences and events.

In the coming months we'll be present at ChefConf in Austin, where we'll feature our redesigned domain management Chef cookbook, Full Stack Toronto, as well as other conferences in the US and Europe. If you happen to be at a conference where we are speaking or attending, please come and say hello.

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Simone Carletti

Italian software developer, a PADI scuba instructor and a former professional sommelier. I make awesome code and troll Anthony for fun and profit.