Developers beware, Microsoft's domain shakeup is coming soon Time is running out for developers and administrators to prepare themselves for Microsoft's one domain to rule them all – cloud.microsoft. Microsoft told the world of its plans to unify its domains just under a year ago and is now reminding developers that it really is time to remove your head from the sand, especially if you' …
Hmmm: whois cloud ... oh Tucows with Italian and Canadian addresses in the record. I hope MS are running part or all of uniregistry.net's DNS otherwise it might go walkies or crap itself in the road.
Why on earth would you dump a reasonably serious sounding .com address for the rather nebulous and flimsy sounding .cloud?
It's not quite as daft as "Consignia". A company with famously red vans and post boxes with a gold logo and brand names that many firms would give several other people's kidneys for (Royal Mail, Post Office etc) tried rebranding with a new name coz ... S&M and that.
It will probably end up being dumped by a .cloud deny list on many firewalls.
I do hope due dil has really been very, very diligent.
"Microsoft's stated goal is to use microsoft.com for "non-product experiences" such as marketing or support, while cloud.microsoft will handle authenticated, user-facing product experiences."
"non-product experiences?" "user-facing product experiences?" "authenticated?" (by whom?, to what purpose?) What, if anything, does all this mean? Is an English translation available?
Non product experiences - marketing gumph, product documentation, their online store
user-facing product experiences - web applications
authenticated - you have to log in with your Microsoft account password / 2fa
If it worked as promoted currently by Micros~1 it would be a great way to filter the marketing stuff (*.microsoft.com) when using their services.
What are the odds that i'll be able to whitelist scripts in my browser for the "user-facing product experiences" *.cloud.microsoft (or even*.microsoft) only and have authentication and services working properly?
I fully expect this attempt at a "reduction in the fragmentation of domains" to work out like attempts at creating one univseral standard for all use cases.
It sounds like they are diversifying. teams.microsoft.com is one domain, whereas multiple things *.cloud.microsoft are multiple ones, which can have multiple name servers involved. Not a lot of diversification, but there is some. A major DNS failure probably won't be much better with that, but it won't make it worse.
The answer is a huge NO.
I'm sure that there is a whole team in MS Towers whose sole job is to dream up new ways to piss the user base off - again and again and again and...
It is getting tiresome. My company has had it with MS. The latest W11 update when rolled out borked 23% of desktops. We are working on a Linux desktop for 150+ users. As for Teams.... Shit and more shit. The users told us in no uncertain terms that is was an inhibitor to productivity. It lasted just 6 weeks.
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Dorothy Parker had the good fortune of never having to deal with MS cruft. If she had, her question would be less rhetorical.
A 1906 Montana (US) newspaper's
"...when there is no fresh hell to serve, it does the next best thing and dishes up some warmed-over hell."
is even more applicable.
This might be a useful change for organisations whose staff access Office 365 through firewalls and proxy servers. Microsoft recommend allowing direct (non-proxied) connectivity to their service endpoints in order to minimise latency and give the best user experience, or at least disable proxy authentication when accessing them. If your browser traffic goes down a corporate VPN connection then Microsoft recommend configuring a split tunnel for Office 365. Yes, they are that pretentious. No, for the most part it isn't actually necessary. The exception is Teams, which needs its media streams to be firewalled through in order to work adequately. If this isn't done it will fall back to encapsulating the traffic within HTTPS which doesn't tend to work very well.
Microsoft publish an updated list of endpoint host/domain names and IP addresses each *month* that admins of such organisations should supposedly use to update their firewalls/proxies/PAC files/group policies that control the flow of Office 365 traffic. Mercifully the list is available in machine-readable (JSON) format, but it's very helpfully left as an exercise for you to figure out how to script it into place. See here for the gorey details:
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/enterprise/urls-and-ip-address-ranges?view=o365-worldwide
The list of domain names gives me the distinct impression of a bunch of people working on Office 365 without any coordination, throwing the product back-end together at random with no real plan. If all that rubbish can be simplified down to *.cloud.microsoft then that would be useful. I wouldn't be surprised if Microsoft found it a burden to keep track of it all too. This just leaves the IP addresses, which is more forgivable as it hopefully provides some redundancy/resilience.
Jimbot bud, no-one wants to read a balanced and fair description of why this might actually be a good idea.
Read the room.
This is an outrageously stupid decision that is purely marketing led and designed to make normal users suffer.
See? Easy when you know absolutely fuck all about the subject!
In the year 2012, ICANN allowed anyone who could pay a $185,000 fee to apply to be given control of a new Top Level Domain of their choice.
Microsoft corporation applied for the dot Microsoft TLD and was granted it in the year 2015.
A load of new GTLDs were created. Keeping a TLD alive costs at least $50,000 a year for ICANN fees and servers so some of them have lapsed.
ICANN currently plan to reopen applications in the year 2026.
If more than one entity want a particular TLD, if a TLD is controversial or if there are existing trademarks then the application process can take many years.
I can just about get my head round generic TLDs. But one for each big corp? Not least because corporations, even Microsoft, change their names (Google => Alphabet. Facebook => Meta) or go bust. Someone will always want a `.books` TLD. But who's go to want a `.microsoft` one when they are ashes?
If Microsoft ceases to exist, their TLD will probably lapse. But you're going to have to wait a while. Microsoft isn't likely to fail in the short term, and even if it changes its name for some reason, the old one will still have importance. Facebook may call itself Meta now, but the name and domain connected to Facebook still has a lot of meaning. The same applies to Google/Alphabet. When they changed the name of their corporation, they didn't change the name of the service. Even when a name is supposed to be retired, the change does not happen quickly. Elon Musk may want us to call Twitter X, but the x.com domain just redirects to various names without X in them, but with twitter in them. People still recognize the Twitter name, and if someone else eventually takes the husk that Musk left, I can guarantee that they'll want the Twitter brand and will probably not care too much about the X one, which is good because Musk is oddly obsessed with it and undoubtedly will want to keep it for something.
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