I think there was already a domain, something like wmfcloud.org.

I fee like that's bad branding. People have to remember "wmf" is "wikimedia" and tie that with "cloud" and remember it's ".org". It's almost a password.

Examples of other companies following this approach ($subdivision.$companydomain):

• cloud.google.com
• aws.amazon.com
• azure.microsoft.com
• cloud.digitalocean.com

https://wikitech.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Cloud_Services_team/Rebranding_Cloud_Services_products#Changing_domain_names

It probably is past time to start putting the new domains that we bought as part of the creation of Cloud Services into use. One of the prior blockers was LetsEncrypt wildcard certs. The sub-sub domain approach has a lot of potential issues with TLS certificates, CSRF, and Cookie isolation that the separate domains were intended to avoid. From a brand point of view, Wikimedia/Wikimedia/MediaWiki has already jumped all of the sharks. I'm also pretty sure that only folks who do web development or SEO for a living actually care about domain names and URLs. Everyone else uses bookmarks and search engines.

Related: I have been dragging my feet on putting toolforge.org into service because I want that switch to also change the URL routing for tools from tools.wmflabs.org/<toolname> to <toolname>.toolforge.org (T125589). I keep hoping that adopting a PaaS is "just a few quarters away" (T136264) and felt that the subdomain isolation would be a nice carrot to offer along with that to encourage adoption.

@bd808 cool, thanks for the historical perspective. I'll close this ticket since there isn't any action items right now. When the time comes we can use one of those domains.