By Anouar Adlani — former CTO, EuroDNS
Twitter, Reddit, GitHub, Spotify, Netflix — all down. The servers were fine. The load balancers were fine. The problem was a single DNS provider nobody had thought to treat as a single point of failure.
That was October 2016. It still happens today.
DNS is the protocol that makes everything else work. It's also the protocol that most engineers understand just well enough to set up once and never touch again. Until something breaks. And when DNS breaks, it's invisible, urgent, and almost impossible to debug without the right mental model.
This course is that mental model. 9 modules, 89 lessons, built from 20 years of running internet infrastructure — from inside a European domain registrar to building a domain threat platform that monitors millions of names daily.
Not theory. Production knowledge, from someone who has debugged these failures at 3am.
Anouar Adlani joined EuroDNS in 2006 as a software architect. He became CTO. In nine years, he built and operated the systems handling millions of domain registrations, zone updates, and registry protocols for European markets.
He didn't just read the RFCs. He ran into the edge cases they don't cover: ccTLD quirks that break every migration plan, the gap between what the spec says should happen and what actually happens when 47 domains need to transfer and two have expired auth codes, the registrar-level attacks that bypass the DNS protocol entirely.
After EuroDNS, he built X-RAY at EBRAND — a platform that monitors the domain namespace for threats at scale. Same infrastructure. Different angle: watching what bad actors do with domain names when they're trying to impersonate your brand or steal your credentials.
This course comes from both seats.
You've set up DNS before. You know what an A record is. But every time something breaks — email stops delivering, a deployment fails, a TLS certificate won't provision — you spend hours figuring out why. You want a mental model that makes DNS problems feel diagnosable, not random.
You're the person who gets paged when DNS breaks. You want the depth to know whether a problem is in the authoritative server, the resolver, the application, or somewhere else entirely — without spending 40 minutes ruling out the wrong layers first.
You're responsible for a portfolio. You need a framework for decisions, not just a list of what to register. You want to understand the legal tools (UDRP, registry locks, CT monitoring), the economics of brand protection, and how to build a strategy that survives budget discussions.
After this module you can read a zone file without squinting and diagnose a basic resolution failure without guessing.
After this module you can know where the attacks come from, what DNSSEC actually protects against, and what to monitor before something goes wrong.
After this module you can write DNS-aware code, configure service discovery correctly in containers, and cut DNS latency by 80% with five lines of config.
After this module you can debug any DNS failure systematically, in under ten minutes, without guessing.
After this module you can make no email problem look random. You'll know exactly what's failing and why.
After this module you can evaluate new DNS technology without the vendor framing.
After this module you can know what you own, why you own it, what it costs, and what happens if you lose it.
After this module you can have a tiered framework for brand protection that fits an actual budget.
After this module you can have the complete picture, not a set of isolated pieces.
“The first course I've seen that treats DNS like what it actually is: critical infrastructure with real failure modes, not just a feature you configure once.”
“The DMARC and email authentication module alone was worth the time. Two hours and I finally understood why our deliverability was broken.”
89 lessons. 9 modules. 20 years of production experience, organized so you can use it.
Or jump straight to Module 1 if you'd rather learn by doing.