A left-of-domain strategy organizes separate products or capability subsets in DNS subdomains before a primary domain. Consistent names improve discovery, clarify ownership, and make services easier for internal developers, customers, and third-party developers to use. section 7.1.3
Apply the strategy by distinguishing product boundaries from internal feature boundaries:
- Reserve subdomains for genuinely separate products or major capability groups. section 7.1.3
- Keep closely related features under a shared product domain when separate subdomains would fragment navigation. section 7.1.3
- Pair the left-of-domain decision with a right-of-domain strategy for capabilities and resources delivered by development teams. section 7.1.3
Google and GitHub
Google can use subdomains for distinct branded products. GitHub instead benefits from api.github.com for its unified product, with related capabilities such as Orgs represented as api.github.com/orgs rather than orgs.github.com. section 7.1.3
Figure 7.3 Our engineering platform must provide a self-serve experience for each internal customer (development team) to configure their service to receive traffic based on our company’s “product” decision for how the DNS domain and subdomain names reflect our digital products.
Use the platform view to connect DNS naming decisions with self-service traffic configuration for development teams. section 7.1.3
