After its launching in the 90s, load balancing becomes a game-changer in traffic distribution across networks. Round-Robin as a load balancer is significant in maintaining the flow of data moving efficiently and easily among servers and endpoints. It is also one of the most common and affordable techniques. Let’s explain a little bit more about it.
How does load balancing work?
Load balancing is a method for distributing traffic across networks. It is managing the different servers such networks include. Mainly the traffic in large networks has to be led to increasing the efficient general performance. Otherwise, you risk having weak sports in some points.
Why do you need Round-Robin DNS?
Few servers can get flooded with high traffic, and others at the same time could barely operate. This causes an incredible mess. Security threats like DDoS attacks will become less detectable and a lot more harmful.
Whit the load balancing method, you can administrate the traffic and optimize the network’s performance. The process is strongly recommended. A few more of its benefits are also faster loading time and a backup in case of an interruption.
Round – Robin DNS definition
Round-Robin DNS is a DNS load balancing technique that administrates the traffic. It depends on when a user request arrives and the number of servers you have. The concept is simple: you have various A or AAAA records that have different IP addresses. With every one of these IP addresses corresponds to a different web server. They have a duplicate of your site. When a user desires to reach your site, its browser tries to resolve your domain name. Your authoritative name server, which is responsible for the A or AAAA records, will give the next in rotation turn A or AAAA records from those you own. It is possible to have records for every one of your web servers. The visitors will be automatically redirected, when they are trying to access your site. This happens in order of the moment when they reached your DNS name server.
Let’s explain it a little bit more.
Think a situation where you have 5 users and 3 servers:
User 1 attaches to server 1, user 2 to server 2, user 3 to server 3.
When user 4 wants to connect with the website, the circle will start again. User 4 will connect to server 1, user 5 to server 2, etc.
DNS Round-Robin will reduce and administrate better the traffic to your site. As a result of Round-Robin, your customers will have a better user experience every time they visit your site. Also, a less saturated network and overall better performance.
The mechanism can be modified. If your web servers are not exactly the same. Let’s assume server 1 is a lot better than the other 2. It is a good idea to use it two times more. Like so, you get the best productivity. Here you could think for the Weighted Round Robin.
Variants to the Round‑Robin algorithm
- Weighted Round-Robin – The site administrator chooses criteria and assigns to each server the weight. The most regularly used criterion is the server’s traffic‑handling capability. The higher the weight, the more significant the proportion of user requests the server receives.
- Dynamic Round-Robin – A weight is allocated to every one of the servers dynamically. It is based on real‑time data about any of the servers’ load at the moment and unused potential.