Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by manigandham 3387 days ago
That's not how it works. Both their DNS and reverse proxy servers use anycast IPs without any DNS-based routing.

They did recently release some features called traffic manager that lets you control the origin server based on geo. If you just need geo-balanced DNS though, AWS Route 53, Azure Traffic Manager, and NSOne offer DNS based routing.
1 comments
problems 3387 days ago
Really? I didn't think they'd do anycast on their reverse proxy servers, that seems risky to me (ie: a TCP connection changes from one server to another due to a BGP change), but I suppose the odds are fairly low.

I seem to remember getting different IPs from different locations, but it could just be random or I could be mistaken.

EDIT: Tried now and it seems I'm getting the same IPs from Canada and Australia, so you are indeed correct.

link
manigandham 3387 days ago
Yes, they have a big address space and announce all ips from every location: https://blog.cloudflare.com/cloudflares-architecture-elimina...

Pretty much all major CDNs use anycast today for load balancing, rolling downtime and security/ddos protection. Http/tcp connections are usually short-lived, relatively cheap to setup (since it's an edge network anyway) and BGP route updates don't happen that often.

LinkedIn switched to anycast too after testing: https://engineering.linkedin.com/network-performance/tcp-ove...

link