[dns-operations] Load balancing DNS queries across many machines

[Joe Abley]

On 16-Jul-2009, at 22:32, Michael Sinatra wrote:

> I see.  So the question was really, has anyone tried any kind of  
> stateful load-sharing protocol for DNS beyond anycast or CARP that  
> might have already done what you want to do.

I know of prominent DNS server clusters built out of individual hosts  
connected to a dedicated load-balancer device, like an f5 BigIP or a  
Foundry ServerIron. Those setups provide stateful load-sharing with a  
variety of origin server selection heuristics. Some of them do address  
family translation, which somebody mentioned.

For others who don't have UCB's experience with build nameserver  
clusters using anycast, I have written that experience up several  
times based (partly or entirely) on work we did at ISC, and maybe some  
of those contain some useful pointers.

   http://www.usenix.org/publications/login/2008-02/openpdfs/abley.pdf
   http://ftp.isc.org/isc/pubs/tn/isc-tn-2004-1.txt
   http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc4786.txt
   http://nanog.org/meetings/nanog34/presentations/abley.nameservers.pdf


Joe