The goal of the NTP Pool is to provide accurate time to everybody. Though internally its really about serving DNS requests. Quite a lot of them, and ideally fast.

Through history weve ended up with using the pool.ntp.org domain for client access which for performance isnt really optimal, but its what we have. Through a bit of administrative division it ends up that just to find out who to ask for the IP of 1.fedora.pool.ntp.org you have to send a whole lot of DNS requests out.

While the DNS system is resilient in handling failures, to get decent performance its important that each "layer" has fast and highly available servers. To that end were fortunate that Dynect are providing Anycast DNS services for the NTP Pool (about 300 million requests a month right now, and were just getting started).

For now were just using Dynect for the ntpns.org zone, but in the future were looking forward to also using their failover system to help make sure the pool website is always available.