There have been a number of interesting new developments in the content routing space recently — specifically, the issue of how to get content to end-users from the most optimal point on the network. I’ll be talking about Cisco and Juniper in a forthcoming blog post, but for now, let’s start with Google:

A couple of weeks ago, Google and UltraDNS (part of Neustar) proposed an extension to the DNS protocol that would allow DNS servers to obtain the IP address of the end-user who originally made the request. DNS is normally recursive — the end-user queries his local DNS resolver server, which then makes queries up the chain on his behalf. The problem with this is that the resolver is not necessarily actually local — it might be far, far away from the user. And the DNS servers of things like CDNs use the location of the DNS query to figure out where the user is, which means that they actually return an optimal server for the resolver’s location, not the user’s.

I wrote about this problem in some detail about a year and a half ago, in a blog post: The nameserver as CDN vantage point. You can go back and look at that for a more cohesive explanation and a look at some numbers that illustrate how much of a problem resolver locations create. The Google proposal is certainly a boon to CDNs as well as anyone else that relies upon DNS for global load-balancing solutions. In the ecosystem where it’s supported, the enhancement will also give a slight performance boost to CDNs with more local footprint, by helping to ensure that the local cache is actually more local to the user. The resolver issue can, as I’ve noted before, erase the advantages of having more footprint closer to the edge, since that edge footprint won’t be used unless there are local resolvers that map to it. Provide the user’s IP, though, and you can figure out exactly what the best server for him is.

There’s no shortage of technical issues to debate (starting with the age-old objection to using DNS for content routing to begin with), and privacy issues have been raised as well, but my expectation is that even if it doesn’t actually get adopted as a standard (and I’m guessing it won’t, by the way), enough large entities will implement it to make it a boon for many users.