DNS SRV for broker discovery

[dpocock]

I created a feature request for this and there haven't been any comments so far.  I may be able to prepare a pull request for this, but I would like to know what other people think, make sure nobody is working on anything similar, etc.

Is there any feeling that this would be a bad idea or that it would be a positive thing to complement the existing mechanisms used by the client to discover the servers in a HornetQ cluster?

https://issues.jboss.org/browse/HORNETQ-1270

[ataylor]

There are a few things being actively developed around this area, things like Fuse fabric and gateway are all solving a similar problem but with added functionality. I'm not sure if there would be any advantage of doing it via DNS. Saying that i don't know much about how much DNS could be leveraged for clusters that are elastic or where backups come and go.

[jbertram]

I can't say that it would be a bad idea.  However, I'm having trouble understanding what specific use-case this functionality would service that isn't already covered by the clustering tech we already have (including static, UDP, and JGroups integration).  I'm not saying it wouldn't.  I just don't understand it well enough.

Also, I think any such implementation would need tests in our test-suite to validate its functionality which would likely require a Java based DNS implementation whose life-cycle could be integrated as part of the tests.

Finally, it seems like there would also need to be some kind of tool to query and/or manipulate the DNS entries.

[jbertram]

@dpocock, can you comment on Andy's reply?  How does this work when servers are coming up and going down frequently?  Do the DNS updates make it into the client's hands in a timely manner?