… updated on Wednesday, February 1, 2023 07:49 UTC

What Is Anycast?

Whenever I start digging into technical details, I learn something new. A few days ago I’ve stumbled across the term anycast, which is a very interesting way to solve scalability issues:

  1. Deploy geographically dispersed servers using the same IP address (obviously they would also need a unique IP address or you wouldn't be able to manage them);
  2. Advertise your service as residing on that IP address (for example, use the IP address in NS records for DNS zones you host)
  3. Advertise the IP address (or corresponding IP prefix) into the Internet from multiple locations.

Anycast works best with simple request-response UDP applications (for example, DNS) and has been used for ages to implement large-scale DNS deployments (for example, root name servers).

Using anycast for TCP sessions is trickier. It works reasonably well in the global Internet where the anycast endpoints are far enough from each other and true equal-cost multipathing is rare. CloudFlare is using anycast globally and managed to tweak their TCP/IP stack to use anycast source IP addresses. LinkedIn has fewer points-of-presence and decided to use regional anycast.

Using anycast TCP endpoints in data centers is harder and requires fine-tuned interaction with network-layer multipathing as well as a bag of intricate tricks.

For more details, watch the Load Balancing and Scale-Out Architectures part of the Data Center Infrastructure for Networking Engineers webinar and the Global Accelerator video in the Amazon Web Services Networking webinar.

Revision History

2023-02-01
Added links to UDP and TCP anycast use cases

Latest blog posts in Anycast Resources series

More blog posts in this series

Recent posts in the same categories

6 comments:

  1. Anonymous 03 July 2008 07:42
    You know, the myth that anycast and tcp don't mix well is just that, a myth. There are many many large anycast clouds serving thousands of tcp sessions.

    A couple of papers on anycast + tcp:

    http://www.nanog.org/mtg-0606/pdf/matt.levine.pdf
    http://www.netcat.ca/tag/tcp-anycast/

    It is true that if the node goes down that the tcp sessions would fail, however, that is the case if you're using anycast or not.
  2. Roland Dobbins 03 July 2008 09:28
    I want to agree and expand upon Patrick's comments - multi-tier Web applications typically don't carry a lot of state on the front-end in the first place, and, secondly, if you're experiencing so many fluctuations in your IGP that this would be problematic at the TCP level, you've larger problems which need solving first, anyways.

    The best way to do anycasting is to run a routing daemon on the host, so as to minimize the risk of blackholing traffic in the event of a host outage.
  3. Ivan Pepelnjak 06 July 2008 20:16
    The problem with TCP-over-Anycast is that the change in global BGP state (nothing to do with the stability of the servers or IGP) could redirect the end-user's traffic to another Anycast server, resulting in disrupted TCP session. The presentation Patrick mentioned in his comment admits and addresses this concern in numerous ways:

    * Your upstream ISP has to provide effective BGP communities (#4)
    * Coasts and countries appear to provide enough padding for route instability (#6)
    * Nodes that are near by could possibly require state between each node if routes are unstable (#6)
    * There's also the "Gotchas" slide (#20)

    However, the actual statistical data they've provided (#19) indicate that the failure rate is so low that you can ignore it, meaning that although my reservations were valid, they were mostly academic :) Thanks for pointing that out.
  4. Roland Dobbins 07 July 2008 14:29
    In most cases, BGP things which happen outside one's own network won't have any effect at all on which TCP front-end server ends up servicing the requests. But as stated above, and as you note, this is firstly rare, and secondly, given modern applications architectures, won't matter if it happens, anyways.
  5. Anonymous 07 July 2008 23:53
    One popular use of anycast is in IP Multicast to support the redundant rendezvous points (aka Anycast RP). See this white paper below:

    http://www.cisco.com/en/US/docs/ios/solutions_docs/ip_multicast/White_papers/anycast.pdf

    It's using MSDP to make Anycast RP possible.
  6. Anonymous 07 August 2008 04:00
    You should use anycast whereever you ask the customer to hard code an IP address. This allows you to alter your topology at something faster than the rate of change of your slowest customer.

    Anycast is also commonly used for DNS and RADIUS. For an introduction on DNS Anycast see http://www.gdt.id.au/~gdt/presentations/2006-07-18-linuxsa-anycast/
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