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I would like to bring up the load on a new server slowly over time.

Unfortunately there is no front-end load balancer we can use to adjust this, so I just insert a new DNS record for the domain name. This will split the traffic approximately 50/50 between the old and new servers.

My question is, can I adjust the ratio between the old and new server by entering multiple identical records?

example.com.        300 IN  A   OLD_IP
example.com.        300 IN  A   OLD_IP
example.com.        300 IN  A   NEW_IP

I would hope the above example splits the load 1/3 and 2/3 between the new and old servers.

Jacob Groundwater
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1 Answers1

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Yes you can, but DNS remains a crude and unreliable way of doing loadbalacing.

Dennis Kaarsemaker
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    And also only if your DNS server doesn't choke on duplicate records and doesn't silently collapse duplicates. – longneck Jan 25 '13 at 22:01
  • Not that I disagree with you, but I think we should fill this answer in a little more. What makes it crude and unreliable? Google does it, and Amazon Elastic Load Balancers use multiple DNS records. – Jacob Groundwater Jan 25 '13 at 23:08
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    It's crude because you can't really control the balance. It's unreliable because you rely on clients doing the right thing, which they don't. Google has a multi-tier loadbalancing solution with dns being the outermost and crudest layer, simply activating entire datacenters. I'm not familiar with ELB, so can't comment on it. – Dennis Kaarsemaker Jan 25 '13 at 23:15