DNS: Old Solution for Modern Problems

As infrastructure becomes more complex, dynamic, and diverse service discovery becomes very important.

There are many solutions to this problem (thrift, rest.li, custom-zk, etc.) all of which require application changes which precludes the use of off-the-shelf software.

We have applications at LinkedIn where it isn't practical to integrate with our internal service discovery systems. After some thought we decided that all of these applications do support a common service discovery system: our old friend DNS.

In this presentation, we'll talk about how we implemented a distributed, highly available, eventually consistent service discovery system using DNS written in Go. We'll talk about the design, implementation, and challenges encountered on the way to production.
We'll focus on:

• Architecture
• Extensibility
• Availabilty
• Operability

The Results:

• Significantly reduced complexity
• Dramatic decrease in convergence time
• Ubiquitous service discovery
• Leverage existing DNS infrastructure

Rauf Guliyev is a Traffic SRE at LinkedIn responsible for shuffling bits between devices around the world and LinkedIn's service infrastructure. He likes to solve all kinds of engineering problems and spends his free time building and an exoskeleton race kit car.