Reliable Cloud host ?

[rcarpen at network1.net (Randy Carpenter)]

> Pardon the weird question:
> 
> Is the DNS service authoritative or recursive?  If auth, you can
> solve this a few ways, either by giving the DNS name people point to
> multiple AAAA (and A) records pointing at a diverse set of
> instances.

Authoritative. But, also not the only thing that we are running that needs some geographic and route diversity.

> DNS is designed to work around a host being down.  Same
> goes for MX and several other services.  While it may make the
> service slightly slower, it's certainly not the end of the world.

Oh, how I wish this were true in practice. If I had a dollar for every time we had serious issues because one of a few authoritative DNS servers was not responding... OK, I wouldn't be rich, but this happens all the time. Caching servers out on the net get a "non-answer" because the server they chose to ask was down, and it caches that. They shouldn't do that, but they do, and there's nothing that can be done about it.

-Randy