Wednesday, October 17, 2018

anycast

What are some disadvantages of anycast? also speak specifically to connections

I got asked this in an interview. I know that one of the reasons is that a stream can change mid-connection but I want to make sure I understand the underlying issue here. In unicast addressing, if an address is pulled or whatever reason, that route to that destination is revoked from the bgp routing tables and essentially disappears so you'll never end up elsewhere accidentally. Your packet won't make it to the destination and time out and get dropped. But in anycast, because several "destinations" are all advertising the same address, if anyone of those destinations pulls its announcement, the packets will change direction mid-connection to the next "closest" anycast announcing destination and since that destination doesnt have a connection established for that particular flow, it could be detrimental to an uninterrupted connection. TCP retrans would increase for example.

Is that an acceptable answer/ explanation or did I miss something important in why this issue is worse in some ways than in unicast addressing



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