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The domain "cloudapp.net" is used by Microsoft's Azure service. I ran a dig cloudapp.net command and to my surprise this yielded nothing (no ANSWER section came back in the response). "cloudapp.net" is a main domain in use by Microsoft's Azure service and Azure customers leverage it by having a subdomain off it such as "yourwebsite.cloudapp.net" and using a CNAME to link their branded domain to their sire hosted on the Azure service.

How can you have a domain name "cloudapp.net" that points to nothing basically? It is not required in DNS for a second-level domain to have an IP address linked to it? What would be some reasons for configuring your domain name in such a way? Why not have "cloudapp.net" by default point to the main MS site? Just wanting to understand why this is allowed in DNS and why from a technical perspective a company would choose to do this.

John
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it doesn't actually return 'nothing', if you run dig cloudapp.net IN ANY, you'll see you've been given a list of nameservers, which a recursive dns resolver will follow for more details, or so can you:

dig sub.cloudapp.net IN ANY @prd1.azuredns-cloud.net

thus, cloudapp.net doesn't need to have a host address record (and isn't required one), a request for a subdomain will still query the main nameservers, which will return a host record for a valid subdomain, or NXDOMAIN if not.

its possible there is an internal or security reason they don't want to point cloudapp.net to a website; perhaps ensure customer flow through one portal. just a hypothesis

pete
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