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. Load balancing increases the flexibility, performance, redundancy and it manages the server failures very efficiently with reduced downtime.
DNS (domain name system) load balancing
DNS Load balancing is a domain name system which maps and configures the domain names for your business. It acts as a phone book for the internet. We can say that DNS is a particular identity for any business in which the clients are given the domain name to reach your company’s services. A domain is slightly similar to the mail system, website server, print server or any other service which can access through the internet. DNS is a round robin type of load balancing which is an innovative and a unique scheme for your businesses. It gives a particular domain name to your website according to the services you provide to your customers and this is very easy to remember than any IP address. Every device that sends or receives data has a unique IP address containing a string of numbers. This IP (internet protocol) address acts as an identification number which the internet’s routing hardware and software uses to locate the device. Being in numerical form it is quite difficult to remember the address. Domain name system provides a particular name to your website which is easy to remember and increases your customers.
How DNS Load Balancing Works?
DNS is a central part of the internet which provides names to your websites with their matching IPs. Each and every device which has access to the internet contains a unique IP address with numbers. These numbers look like a phone number and it isn’t an easy task to remember each IP of the websites you are using or working with. So, there’s a domain name to remember. It provides you the domain name according to your IP address. DNS by default sends a list of IP addresses in a manner that each time it will respond to a new customer. So, the different clients will get different servers. This reduces the load and distributes it to different server groups. Generally, a single computer hosts and serves the data for any domain in simple deployments but DNS returns the single server’s IP address. It is an innovative idea but not a perfect thing because it has several unsolved issues, which reduces its reliability and efficiency. It does not check servers and errors and sometimes returns the same IP address for a domain if servers are down. You can set up DNS round robin with cloud by adding more than one IP address to your server. This simplifies your work and increases scalability.
Benefits of DNS(domain name system) load balancing
DNS load balancing helps you to manage the traffic between multiple load balancers, which are used in managing different networks with a server pool. It becomes quite easy to manage the different load balancers with domain name systems at the same time. It can also manage load to your application servers precisely, this increases the protection against failure and increases the scalability for high productivity. DNS improves the performance of your website and increases its reach by providing it a unique identity name matching the IP address. DNS load balancing has become an affordable solution for most of the businesses and nowadays it is very easy to set up in your system and it doesn’t require any extra lookups. This also helps in preventing downtimes and improves availability.
Cloud load balancing
Cloud load balancing is also a type of load balancing used in cloud computing. This includes the distribution of workloads in different computing platforms. Cloud computing brings the flexibility and scalability in servers with affordable budgets and load balancing allows computing platforms to scale up to increasing demands. This reduces the workload in a single computing platform and the workload gets distributed among several networks eventually. This results in the flexibility and increment in productivity. Cloud load balancing does not use hardwares or softwares but uses document management systems and maximizes availability of resources.
Comparison of cloud load balancing with DNS load balancing
Cloud load balancing is the load balancing in cloud computing Platform whereas DNS load balancing is a domain name system providing the domain name for any IP address. DNS load balancing uses the softwares and hardwares to perform its functions while cloud load balancing uses the different services offered by different networks in a cloud. Cloud load balancing is more beneficial over DNS if you are working on large applications which have to be hosted globally as it transfers load to servers globally rather than in any small or local area network. It also increases the response time by routing remote sessions to the efficient data centres. DNS makes it easy to manage different load balancers with a single server and it increases the reach by nullifying the memory issues and providing a name to your websites. Domain name system load balancing is easy to set up and is affordable for most of the businesses. DNS requests of clients are rotated and shared across multiple domain instances, so that the single server will not get a complete load. This is the working methodology of DNS load balancing over cloud load balancing.