The NS1 Filter Chain offers three types of "sticky" filters: Sticky Shuffle, Group Sticky Shuffle, and Weighted Sticky Shuffle. Sticky filters distribute traffic across multiple answers while ensuring DNS queries from the same source IP address are handled consistently over time.
This filter arranges answers uniquely based on the requester's IP address. The order of answers in the response remains the same for the same requesting client. Use this filter with the Select First N filter to return only the first N (number) of answers to the same client (as opposed to returning the entire list).
If you enable the "Apply stickiness by subnet (not by individual IP)" option, then requests in the same IPv4 or IPv6 subnet receive the same output. Enable this option to ensure users balanced across multiple recursors get the same answer.
Note
If you need to configure weighted answers with "sticky" behavior, use the Weighted Sticky Shuffle filter instead.
Note
Refer to the article about Sticky filters for more information.
This filter arranges answers uniquely based on the requester IP address, and then groups all answers together by region. Use this filter with the Select First N filter to always return the same answers from the same region to the same client.
This filter does not do any geo-targeting or global server load balancing. It sorts regions randomly but consistently for each user. Answers with no defined region are considered to be in the same (empty) region.
If you enable the "Apply stickiness by subnet (not by individual IP)" option, then requests coming from the same IPv4 or IPv6 subnet receive the same output. Enable this option to ensure that users balanced across multiple recursors get the same answer.
Note
Refer to the article about Sticky filters for more information.
This filter combines the behavior of the Sticky Shuffle and Weighted Shuffle filters to randomly shuffle answers based on the weight metadata field consistently across the same source IP address.
Note
Any changes made to the answers or their assigned "weight" will cause this filter to reshuffle answers — even for a repeat requester.
If you select "Apply stickiness by subnet (not by individual IP), then requests in the same IPv4 or IPv6 subnet receive the same output. Select this option to ensure that users balanced across multiple recursors get the same answer.
Note
Refer to the article about Sticky filters for more information.
Note that since the NS1 platform is queried by DNS resolvers and not directly by end-users, the stickiness enabled by these filters is with respect to the DNS resolver's IP address and not that of the end-user. The exception is when the DNS resolver supports edns-client-subnet (ECS), and ECS support is enabled for the DNS record, in which case, the stickiness is applied to the IP prefix contained in the ECS data sent in the DNS query.