On the Use of Anycast in DNS

In this paper, we measure the performance impact of anycast on DNS. We study four top-level DNS servers to evaluate how anycast improves DNS service and compare different anycast configurations. Increased availability is one of the supposed advantages of anycast and we found that indeed the number of observed outages was smaller for anycast, suggesting that it provides a mostly stable service. On the other hand, outages can last up to multiple minutes, mainly due to slow BGP convergence. We also found that anycast indeed reduces query latency. Furthermore, depending on the anycast configuration used, 37% to 80% of the queries are directed to the closest anycast instance. Our measurements revealed an inherent trade-off between increasing the percentage of queries answered by the closest server and the stability of the DNS zone, measured by the number of query failures and server switches. We believe that these findings will help network providers to deploy anycast more effectively in the future.