Customer story · Duende SoftwareLinks shipped in the SDK. Still current a year later.
Duende Software builds IdentityServer, the SDK developers use to build and run their own identity and access management. Its logs, posts and talks point to duende.link short links that Duende can redirect at any time, kept in git and synced through the RedirHub API. And when the blog moved into duendesoftware.com, every old post and feed URL came along.
info: see https://duende.link/… for details
RedirHub short linkdestination changed in git, synced by API301 · Livedocs.duendesoftware.com/… (today’s page)
Duende Softwareduendesoftware.com ↗Industry · Developer tools, identityUses · Branded short links, API, website migrationCustomer since · February 20252 min read- duende.link short links in git, across 17 domains
- 300+
- requests a month
- 50,000+
- requests to the old blog feed, redirected since the move
- 220,000+
- median response of a duende.link short link (google.com: 38 ms)
- 16 ms
From Duende Software's workspace, rounded, February 2025 to October 2026. Speed: median time to first byte from Washington, D.C., Frankfurt and Tokyo, 10 runs each, October 2026.
Links inside software customers already run
IdentityServer is a library that developers embed in their own software, and its logs point them to documentation and other resources. Those log lines stay in every version a customer runs, and upgrade cycles can take a year or more. Because the links go through duende.link, Duende can change where each one leads long after the version that printed it has shipped.
We have no guarantee that our customers will always run on the latest version. Different customers have different upgrade policies, and sometimes upgrade cycles take up to or even over a year. So what if we want to update these URLs? Short links are great here, as we can always change where a specific link ultimately redirects to.
Maarten BalliauwHead of Customer Success, Duende SoftwareA short link adds no noticeable wait. Measured from Washington, D.C., Frankfurt and Tokyo (median time to first byte, 10 runs each), duende.link/06oct26 answered in 16 ms, while google.com's own redirect took 38 ms. Run the same test.
Short links, managed as code
The same short domain carries links for social posts, QR codes and talk slides, where long URLs with campaign tags are unwieldy and make QR codes denser. Every duende.link lives in a git repository. Anyone at Duende can propose a new link or a change in a pull request; once it is merged, a pipeline checks that every destination resolves and applies the changes through the RedirHub API. Some of Duende's marketing domains are managed the same way.
We heavily use infrastructure-as-code, including for RedirHub. All of our short links are in a git repository, where Duende employees can add/update/remove short links via a pull request. When merged, we validate the redirects all point to a valid location, and then use the RedirHub API to add/remove/update these links in production.
Damian HickeyChief Architect, Duende SoftwareA blog move that kept every reader
Duende moved its blog from blog.duendesoftware.com into duendesoftware.com/blog, for a better reading experience next to the product and for the main domain's authority in search. Every old post URL and the RSS feed now answer with a permanent redirect to the new address. Third-party articles still link to the old domain, and aggregators still poll the old feed: more than 220,000 feed requests have followed that one redirect since the move, which the team can watch in the RedirHub stats.
We use RedirHub to redirect all of the old URLs to the new location, including RSS URL and so forth. These are permanent redirects, however we want to keep the old URLs around still: older third-party content may link to us on the old domain, and several automated aggregators exist that still crawl our blog.duendesoftware.com-based RSS feed.
Maarten BalliauwHead of Customer Success, Duende SoftwareDocumentation, too
When older documentation moved from ReadTheDocs to docs.duendesoftware.com, Duende put RedirHub in between, so the team can fine-tune where old links and searches land without changing settings on ReadTheDocs each time.
For teams that ship software
Ship links you can still change.
Short-link what you can't update
Logs, docs, slides and QR codes outlive the release that printed them.
Keep links in git
Review them in pull requests, validate destinations, sync through the API.
Move content, keep the URLs
Redirect every old page and the feed, and watch who still uses them.