Why are there no GeoDNS solutions anywhere in sight?

Thu Mar 21 06:55:41 UTC 2013

On 20 March 2013 20:43, Andrew Sullivan <asullivan at dyn.com> wrote:
> On Wed, Mar 20, 2013 at 08:28:23PM -0700, Constantine A. Murenin wrote:
>> Any plans to make DNS itself GeoDNS-friendly?
>
> No.  And I say this as someone working for a vendor that provides that
> service.
>
> Any sort of "Geo" DNS is what protocol people would call a "stupid DNS
> trick".  It works in particular, narrowly-scoped ways because of the
> loose coherence of the DNS.  But as a matter of protocol, you can't
> really standardize it, because it's actually taking advantage of
> certain flexibilities in the DNS and its interaction with the routing
> system.  Turning that operational fact into a protocol feature would
> be a bad idea.

You are coming to this from the perspective of the existing
conventions, and the current way that GeoDNS is done through a
Split-Horizon DNS hack.

But this is not what I want.

What I want is an ability to specify multiple A and AAAA records, and
their locations, and make it possible for the web-browser to
automatically select the best location based on the presumed location
of the user.  Browsers might have a couple of rules, e.g. that Europe
and parts of Asia are currently not directly connected to Asia, but NA
is, and such rules would influence browser's decision to choose a
Quebec server for a user in Japan, since it'll likely be much closer
than the one in Moscow.

Does it sound too complicated and pointy?  Yes, it's not exactly
trivial, and not as good as BGP, but better than having 300ms latency
from a simple round-robin.

C.