Hello all,
The company I work for has a fair large (in my opinion) anycast network with around 15 physical locations around the world. Anycast is great when it works, but really can only be thought of as a load balancer, not a way to get the best traffic delivery - again IMHO. Issues with anycast really shine through when budget networks like Cogent come into play, often the shortest AS path is Cogent as the end user's ISP uses cogent and we have an uplink with Cogent but going end to end with Cogent often is slow ... The better path is in many cases is to quite literally go Cogent -> XO -> Cogent or something like that, or you pass from Hong Kong to Los Angels on PCCW instead of going across two networks and using the Hong Kong DC... Anyhow that wasn't my point (;
When using GeoDNS it doesn't provide the best network result either, mostly thanks to the popularity of things like 8.8.8.8 and 1.1.1.1 you sometimes find you will go the whole wrong coast of the USA or a user in Eastern Canada GeoLocations via GeoDNS as being in London...
What I'm finding though, is if I combine our anycast network, and then geoDNS on top of it I generally come up with the closest physical and generally best network edge to use. Am I crazy to over complicate this? Does it make sense to Anycast and then use GeoDNS data to Geolocate a user? Is there a better way? I've read many articles about how Dropbox or even Cloudflair (to a smaller degree) does this or that, most of which I believe to be total bullshit. The internet is not magic, and I believe 99% of the bragging these types of companies brag about how they get users to the best edge is a total like or highly highly embellished.
Thanks for your comments and time?
No comments:
Post a Comment