Zinc

Zinc is a Route 53 zone manager that provides a simple REST API for your basic DNS needs and implements policy records for Route 53.

What’s its purpose?

Zinc is one of the core components of the Presslabs’ managed WordPress hosting infrastructure. By writing it, we strive to provide a fast experience for all our customers’ visitors through latency-based routing. When someone tries to access a site, the server with the lowest latency should serve it for them so that the site loads as fast as possible, and Zinc makes this possible by using Route 53’s Latency-Based Routing. Zinc leverages Route 53’s healthchecks to ensure traffic is only directed towards healthy servers.

In 2017, we released Zinc to the open source world in the hopes to make a difference for the readers of quality content sites and also for the developers that are facing the beautiful challenges of the ever-green triangle of good-fast-cheap.

How the idea came up

We are hosting thousands of sites on our geographically distributed fleet of front-end servers and one of our priorities is to provide availability through redundancy. Having a lot of policy routed records, the cost of AWS’s Policy Records become prohibitive. So, the awesome engineering team at Presslabs decided to create Zinc against using Route 53’s policy based records, that provides a simple REST API for your basic DNS needs.

How to contribute

Development of gitfs happens on GitHub. You are highly encouraged to contribute with code, tests, documentation, or just to share your experience.

Get involved