Thursday, November 17, 2016

[cptggwey] Load balancing with subdomains

Consider a protocol in which a client is not provided with a full host name to connect to, but a domain name.  The client is supposed to generate a random host name to prefix in front of the domain name.  The server's DNS can be configured to provide an IP addresses for any host name.  This provides a client-driven mechanism for load balancing, which seems somewhat less sleazy than the current common method, in which one host name gets mapped or redirected to multiple different IP addresses, with load balancing baked into DNS.

With the clients generating nonces, we lose the benefit of the DNS fabric being permitted to cache.  Perhaps the client checks a few agreed-upon common hostnames first, then if those are down or slow, creates a random one.  Maybe a new DNS query that asks for or returns any cached *.domain.tld as a fallback.

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