Can DNS be my Message Router?

In my post on Guerilla SOA, a reader posted the question as to whether we could use DNS as our means of routing messages between endpoints. The point that was made was that we could define a different host name for each endpoint, and then if we needed to physically move an endpoint we could simply update the DNS entry and messages would still be routed correctly.

Although this point is valid, DNS doesn't give us the power and granularity of routing we require in an SOA environment.

Firstly, DNS will only help us route a message to a physical machine. An endpoint address contains more than just the host name. For example:

net.msmq://policy-service.myorg.com/private/policy_requests

Here we have the transport being specified (net.msmq), as well as the queue name (/private/policy_requests). If we were to change the either of these details, updating our DNS record would be insufficient for our service consumers to continue communicating with our service.

Moreover with this approach, we still have the same coupling discussed in my last post. If we restructure our service contract such that our messages now need to be routed to different endpoints, we would need to update our service consumers.

So although DNS does abstract physical host addresses, we get better decoupling from a more powerful routing mechanism.