[dns-operations] Anyone from AWS here?

[Colm MacCárthaigh]

On Sun, Oct 8, 2017 at 6:28 PM, Mark Andrews <marka at isc.org> wrote:
>
> It appears that AWS uses octal escape sequences in their interface
> instead of the industry standard decimal escapes as specified in
> STD 13 (RFC 1035).
>
> https://forums.aws.amazon.com/thread.jspa?messageID=674778

AWS people are here, I'm pretty sure I wrote the code that's parsing
this, around 7 years ago!  I remember the decision to go with octal.
We decided based on talking to customers, what their preferences are,
and what they would find least surprising. In fact we started with the
first customer who needed it.

The Route 53 API is an XML web services API, called from SDKs that are
available for several languages. Customer feedback was pretty
universal that octal or hex would be least confusing, with octal being
the least ambiguous. This is the behavior they are used to in the
languages they are calling our API from. The job of the Route 53 API
after all is to translate programmer intent from their source
language, to DNS records that they can then query.

That means we're caught between two different 'standard' worlds which
occasionally conflict, the programming ones, and the DNS ones. In this
case, few customers seem to be familiar with the DNS RFCs, or the
particulars of zone files, so their preference was to go with the
programming standards.

The zone import/export tools do escaping consistent with the RFCs,
where zone-file inter-operability is relevant, and of course
everything is correct on-the-wire.

-- 
Colm