[DNSOP] Re: Side Meeting - DNS Load Balancing

[Joe Abley <[e-mail]>]

On 29 Jun 2024, at 20:13, Ray Bellis <[e-mail]> wrote:

> Can you please ensure that there's time on the agenda for discussion on why it remains a bad idea to use the internet's name to resource mapping scheme to perform what should be achieved in the routing layer?

This seems like a bit of an inflammatory overreach, Ray :-)

Names as a layer of indirection between applications and addresses represent dynamic data by design, and the idea that the manner by which that data can be managed must be rigidly constrained seems unnecessary and a bit out of touch with reality.

> The DNS was never designed intended to deliver different answers to different users.

Strictly speaking, that statement is incompatible with the concept of loose coherence which certainly was part of the original design. I appreciate this is not what you meant. 

More broadly, the absence of something from the original design hardly means that it can never exist. See, for example, every DNS-related RFC since 1035.

The DNS hasn't operated within a single namespace for a long time. Different vantage points, different namespaces, different response data. I'm not sure I understand the benefit of pretending this is not true. 

>  DNSSEC solidified that and the practise IMNSHO should be discouraged, not standardised.

DNSSEC did nothing of the sort. 

The practice of off-line signing did not imagine dynamic response policy at query time, because it didn't fit that model very easily. But the fact that some implementations are built around that premise doesn't make other approaches wrong.


Joe