Querying DNS for software updates

As a developer, how do you add an automated check for software updates to your application? You could use DNS! DNS is lightweight, provides redundancy, responses are cacheable, and going through your network resolver gives you some privacy.

But, making DNS changes as part of a software release is not ideal, I've done it. Can we automate this? We can for Go applications! Gopherwatch.org is a free service that monitors the Go sumdb, a transparency log (like certificate transparency) containing all Go "modules" (libraries/applications) and their published versions. Gopherwatch.org provides a DNS interface for querying the latest version for all Go applications/libraries, and the latest Go toolchains.

We'll look at how the Gopherwatch DNS interface works and discuss limitations and possible future improvements. If there's time, we'll also look at how the DNS interface is used to provide one-click or even fully automated software updates for Go services.