Weighted DNS load balancing and canaries

Use Cloud DNS weights and subnet load balancing to canary a pool, then raise traffic as it proves in, with health checks on every target.

Application load balancers only see connections that already arrived. DNS is the first chance to send 10% of answers to a new pool. It will not be perfectly even. It will be good enough to canary a region.

Coarse on purpose

Resolvers cache and represent many users. Use weights for region splits and canaries, not per-request fairness. Inside a pool, keep an application load balancer.

Start conservative

Publish the new pool at a low weight with health checks attached. Watch origin and error metrics, then raise the weight. A one-second TTL makes that raise real.

Subnet splits

When you know resolver space, subnet load balancing is finer than continent maps. Use it sparingly; it is easy to overfit.

CDN in the mix

DNS can steer to more than one CDN or origin hostname. Cloud CDN origin groups handle delivery-side failover after the client has arrived.

Frequently Asked Questions

No. Resolvers cache answers and represent many users. Treat it as a coarse split.

Yes. DNS chooses a pool. The load balancer spreads connections inside that pool.

Low enough to change weights on your schedule. Cloud DNS supports a one-second minimum TTL.

Run this on Cloud DNS.

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