AWS S3 DNS load balancer

Tue Jun 15 15:37:59 UTC 2021

Hello,

On Tue, 15 Jun 2021 at 13:37, Deepak Jain <deepak at ai.net> wrote:
> Is this a “normal” or expected solution or just some local hackery?

It's absolutely normal and expected for a huge service like this to
keep round robin at the DNS server side. YMMV with client side DNS
based round robin (Amazon needs to be in control, not your client
application) and steering traffic from one edge location or host to
another is perfectly legitimate. Also likely as a service provider of
such a huge service you want to keep breaking connections from
applications with clearly hardcoded (or "resolve at startup only") IP
addresses, so that client applications never use this approach (in the
long term at least). After all, as a service provider you want to
avoid hitting the news cycle for a legitimate DNS change, just because
you are not doing it very often and that change triggered a myriad of
outages because of broken customer applications at the same time. So
they just do it often or all the time.

Amazon needs to stay in control of what edge nodes and locations the
clients are hitting, just like CDN's and other endpoints with major
traffic volumes.

None of this is local hackery, it's just basic DNS.

Lukas

Lukas