Round Robin DNS provides a way to spread traffic across multiple resources by specifying more than one IP address (A record) or IPv6 address (AAAA record) for the same hostname.
An example would be a pool of web servers or email servers:
www.example.com IN A 10.0.1.16
IN A 10.0.1.17
IN A 10.0.1.18
When our nameservers receive a query for www.example.com they return all of the records, but the order of the records returned is rotated sequentially after each query. If the above snippet depicted a query and response, then the next query would receive the response:
| Query | Response |
|---|---|
| www.example.com | 10.0.1.18 10.0.1.17 10.0.1.16 |
| www.example.com | 10.0.1.17 10.0.1.18 10.0.1.16 |
It is important to note that this is not a weighted load balancing solution, it’s a statistical load distributor.
