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I'm late to this thread, so my answer will probably just hover alone at the bottom, neglected, sniff sniff.

First off, the right answer to the question is not to answer the question, but to say:

1. "You probably want Windows Network Load Balancing instead." OR
2. "Get with the times, place your static content on something like Cloud Files or S3, and have a CDN mirror it worldwide."

NLB is mature, well suited to the task, and pretty easy to set up. Cloud solutions come with their own pros and cons, which are outside the scope of this question.

Question

is round robin DNS good enough as a starter, better than nothing, "while we research and implement better alternatives" form of load balancing for our static content?

Between, say, 2 or 3 static web servers? Yes, it is better than nothing, because there are DNS providers who will integrate DNS Round Robin with server health checks, and will temporarily remove dead servers from the DNS records. So in this way you get decent load distribution and some high availability; and it all takes less than 5 minutes to set up.

But the caveats outlined by others in this thread do apply:

• Current Microsoft browsers cache DNS data for 30 minutes, so you're looking at more than 30 minutes failover time for a subset of your users, depending on their initial DNS cache state.
• What the users sees during fail-over can be ... strange (you're not using auth on static content, and certainly not form auth, but the link shows something to watch out for).

Other solutions

HAProxy is fantastic, but since Stack Overflow is on the Microsoft technology stack, maybe using the Microsoft load balancing & high availability tools will have less admin overhead. Network Load Balancing takes care of one part of the problem, and Microsoft actually has a L7 HTTP reverse proxy / load balancer now.

I have never used ARR myself, but given that its on its second release, and coming from Microsoft, I assume it has been tested well enough. It has easy to understand docs, here is one on how they see distribution of static and dynamic content on webnodes, and here is a piece on how to use ARR with NLB to achieve both load distribution and high availability.

I'm late to this thread, so my answer will probably just hover alone at the bottom, neglected, sniff sniff.

First off, the right answer to the question is not to answer the question, but to say:

1. "You probably want Windows Network Load Balancing instead." OR
2. "Get with the times, place your static content on something like Cloud Files or S3, and have a CDN mirror it worldwide."

NLB is mature, well suited to the task, and pretty easy to set up. Cloud solutions come with their own pros and cons, which are outside the scope of this question.

Question

is round robin DNS good enough as a starter, better than nothing, "while we research and implement better alternatives" form of load balancing for our static content?

Between, say, 2 or 3 static web servers? Yes, it is better than nothing, because there are DNS providers who will integrate DNS Round Robin with server health checks, and will temporarily remove dead servers from the DNS records. So in this way you get decent load distribution and some high availability; and it all takes less than 5 minutes to set up.

But the caveats outlined by others in this thread do apply:

• Current Microsoft browsers cache DNS data for 30 minutes, so you're looking at more than 30 minutes failover time for a subset of your users, depending on their initial DNS cache state.
• What the users sees during fail-over can be ... strange (you're not using auth on static content, and certainly not form auth, but the link shows something to watch out for).

Other solutions

HAProxy is fantastic, but since Stack Overflow is on the Microsoft technology stack, maybe using the Microsoft load balancing & high availability tools will have less admin overhead. Network Load Balancing takes care of one part of the problem, and Microsoft actually has a L7 HTTP reverse proxy / load balancer now.

I have never used ARR myself, but given that its on its second major release, and coming from Microsoft, I assume it has been tested well enough. It has easy to understand docs, here is one on how they see distribution of static and dynamic content on webnodes, and here is a piece on how to use ARR with NLB to achieve both load distribution and high availability.

I'm late to this thread, so my answer will probably just hover alone at the bottom, neglected, sniff sniff.

First off, the right answer to the question is not to answer the question, but to say:

1. "You probably want Windows Network Load Balancing instead." OR
2. "Get with the times, place your static content on something like Cloud Files or S3, and have a CDN mirror it worldwide."

NLB is mature, well suited to the task, and pretty easy to set up. Cloud solutions come with their own pros and cons, which are outside the scope of this question.

Question

is round robin DNS good enough as a starter, better than nothing, "while we research and implement better alternatives" form of load balancing for our static content?

Between, say, 2 or 3 static web servers? Yes, it is better than nothing, because there are DNS providers who will integrate DNS Round Robin with server health checks, and will temporarily remove dead servers from the DNS records. So in this way you get decent load distribution and some high availability; and it all takes less than 5 minutes to set up.

But the caveats outlined by others in this thread do apply:

• Current Microsoft browsers cache DNS data for 30 minutes, so you're looking at more than 30 minutes failover time for a subset of your users, depending on their initial DNS cache state.
• What the users sees during fail-over can be ... strange (you're not using auth on static content, but the link shows how IE8 caches data between windows).

Other solutions

HAProxy is fantastic, but since Stack Overflow is on the Microsoft technology stack, maybe using the Microsoft load balancing & high availability tools will have less admin overhead. Network Load Balancing takes care of one part of the problem, and Microsoft actually has a L7 HTTP reverse proxy / load balancer now.

I have never used ARR myself, but given that its on its second release, and coming from Microsoft, I assume it has been tested well enough. It has easy to understand docs, here is one on how they see distribution of static and dynamic content on webnodes, and here is a piece on how to use ARR with NLB to achieve both load distribution and high availability.

I'm late to this thread, so my answer will probably just hover alone at the bottom, neglected, sniff sniff.

First off, the right answer to the question is not to answer the question, but to say:

1. "You probably want Windows Network Load Balancing instead." OR
2. "Get with the times, place your static content on something like Cloud Files or S3, and have a CDN mirror it worldwide."

NLB is mature, well suited to the task, and pretty easy to set up. Cloud solutions come with their own pros and cons, which are outside the scope of this question.

Question

is round robin DNS good enough as a starter, better than nothing, "while we research and implement better alternatives" form of load balancing for our static content?

Between, say, 2 or 3 static web servers? Yes, it is better than nothing, because there are DNS providers who will integrate DNS Round Robin with server health checks, and will temporarily remove dead servers from the DNS records. So in this way you get decent load distribution and some high availability; and it all takes less than 5 minutes to set up.

But the caveats outlined by others in this thread do apply:

• Current Microsoft browsers cache DNS data for 30 minutes, so you're looking at more than 30 minutes failover time for a subset of your users, depending on their initial DNS cache state.
• What the users sees during fail-over can be ... strange (you're not using auth on static content, and certainly not form auth, but the link shows something to watch out for).

Other solutions

HAProxy is fantastic, but since Stack Overflow is on the Microsoft technology stack, maybe using the Microsoft load balancing & high availability tools will have less admin overhead. Network Load Balancing takes care of one part of the problem, and Microsoft actually has a L7 HTTP reverse proxy / load balancer now.

I have never used ARR myself, but given that its on its second release, and coming from Microsoft, I assume it has been tested well enough. It has easy to understand docs, here is one on how they see distribution of static and dynamic content on webnodes, and here is a piece on how to use ARR with NLB to achieve both load distribution and high availability.

I'm late to this thread, so my answer will probably just hover alone at the bottom, neglected, sniff sniff.

First off, the right answer to the question is not to answer the question, but to say:

1. "You probably want Windows Network Load Balancing instead." OR
2. "Get with the times, place your static content on something like Cloud Files or S3, and have a CDN mirror it worldwide."

NLB is mature, well suited to the task, and pretty easy to set up. Cloud solutions come with their own pros and cons, which are outside the scope of this question.

Question

is round robin DNS good enough as a starter, better than nothing, "while we research and implement better alternatives" form of load balancing for our static content?

Between, say, 2 or 3 static web servers? Yes, it is better than nothing, because there are DNS providers who will integrate DNS Round Robin with server health checks, and will temporarily remove dead servers from the DNS records. So in this way you get decent load distribution and some high availability; and it takes less than 5 minutes to set up.

But the caveats outlined by others in this thread do apply.

• Current Microsoft browsers cache DNS data for 30 minutes, so clearly you're looking at 30 minutes plus failover time for a subset of your users, depending on their initial DNS cache state.
• What the users sees during fail-over may be ... strange.

Other solutions

Being that Stack Overflow is on the Microsoft technology stack, maybe using the Microsoft load balancing & high availability tools will have less admin overhead. Network Load Balancing takes care of one part of the problem, and Microsoft actually has a L7 HTTP reverse proxy / load balancer now.

I have never used ARR myself, but given that its on its second release, and coming from Microsoft, I assume it has been tested well enough. It has easy to understand docs, here is one on how they see distribution of static and dynamic content on webnodes, and here is a piece on how to use ARR with NLB to achieve both load distribution and high availability.

I'm late to this thread, so my answer will probably just hover alone at the bottom, neglected, sniff sniff.

First off, the right answer to the question is not to answer the question, but to say:

1. "You probably want Windows Network Load Balancing instead." OR
2. "Get with the times, place your static content on something like Cloud Files or S3, and have a CDN mirror it worldwide."

NLB is mature, well suited to the task, and pretty easy to set up. Cloud solutions come with their own pros and cons, which are outside the scope of this question.

Question

is round robin DNS good enough as a starter, better than nothing, "while we research and implement better alternatives" form of load balancing for our static content?

Between, say, 2 or 3 static web servers? Yes, it is better than nothing, because there are DNS providers who will integrate DNS Round Robin with server health checks, and will temporarily remove dead servers from the DNS records. So in this way you get decent load distribution and some high availability; and it all takes less than 5 minutes to set up.

But the caveats outlined by others in this thread do apply:

• Current Microsoft browsers cache DNS data for 30 minutes, so you're looking at more than 30 minutes failover time for a subset of your users, depending on their initial DNS cache state.
• What the users sees during fail-over can be ... strange (you're not using auth on static content, but the link shows how IE8 caches data between windows).

Other solutions

HAProxy is fantastic, but since Stack Overflow is on the Microsoft technology stack, maybe using the Microsoft load balancing & high availability tools will have less admin overhead. Network Load Balancing takes care of one part of the problem, and Microsoft actually has a L7 HTTP reverse proxy / load balancer now.

I have never used ARR myself, but given that its on its second release, and coming from Microsoft, I assume it has been tested well enough. It has easy to understand docs, here is one on how they see distribution of static and dynamic content on webnodes, and here is a piece on how to use ARR with NLB to achieve both load distribution and high availability.