HACKER Q&A
📣 dsjfalksjdflksa

Why isn't multivalue answer DNS used outside Amazon?


Multivalue answer dns is used widely at Amazon (internally and as an aws offering), but it seems like other providers aren't offering this service.

* https://aws.amazon.com/premiumsupport/knowledge-center/multivalue-versus-simple-policies/

* https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2017/06/amazon-route-53-announces-support-for-multivalue-answers-in-response-to-dns-queries/

Does anyone know about why this practice is not widespread outside of Amazon? Besides that, any technical references or analysis about multivalue answer DNS would be helpful.


  👤 ktpsns Accepted Answer ✓
DNS Round robin is as standard practice. Just "dig google.com" in your terminal and your DNS provider will certainly spit out multiple IPs.

https://docs.aws.amazon.com/Route53/latest/DeveloperGuide/re... also mentions a "health" column. Thats beyond the scope of a public world wide DNS with caching, in my opinion.


👤 coolspot
It is widespread for high-load highly-available distributed sites.

Amazon multivalue response is just a short TTL DNS record on a DNS server that returns one address from dynamic set of healthy IPs.

https://github.com/crohr/ebarnouflant/issues/19