Do you know what DNS load balancing means? Have you ever thought about it? It's a pretty important topic that many miss. In this article, you will learn all about DNS load balancing. Let's begin… Before discussing the DNS load balancing let us know shortly about load balancing. Load balancing is the orderly distribution of different application traffic servers and networks in a particular server pool. This gives an outage protection to your business, improves load time, and reduces the server load. Load balancing ensures that no single server will get the complete load as the workload will be distributed among different servers, this improves application responsiveness. It also increases the availability of websites for the users. Load balancers have become an important part of modern applications with improved features and security. There are many types of load balancing such as round robin, weighted round robin load balancing, round robin + uptime monitoring, and regional load balancing among which round robin is the most simplest type of load balancing which rotates through IP addresses in the configuration.
DNS Server Load Balancing is an architecture where Domain Name System (DNS) servers are placed behind a Server Load Balancing system. DNS requests are distributed, or load balanced, across a group of DNS servers. This provides a highly available and high performing DNS infrastructure. DNS technologies provide a built-in load balancing solution based on the DNS protocol specification. Multiple DNS servers are often deployed, and clients performing DNS queries are presented a list of IP addresses for every DNS server. The DNS client protocol will attempt to query the first DNS server, and if this query fails, will fail-over and attempt the query on the next DNS server. This DNS standard solution works well enough for most network environments. The downside with the standard DNS failover mechanism is when one or more of the DNS servers is not responding to DNS queries, the client will pause until the request times out. This timeout period depends on the client system. Typical timeout periods are 15 seconds or more.