nanog mailing list archives

Re: Anycast but for egress


From: Bill Woodcock <woody () pch net>
Date: Wed, 28 Jul 2021 08:09:31 -0700



On Jul 28, 2021, at 3:21 AM, Mark Tinka <mark@tinka.africa> wrote:
On 7/28/21 01:16, Daniel Corbe wrote:

This is interesting... I wonder whether Anycast will still have some failure modes and break TCP connections if 
routing (configuration) were to change?  I checked the PDF linked by Bill Woodcock... while the methodology is the 
same from 20y ago, would the data still be the same (order of magnitude)? :)

We are Anycast'ing DNS (authoritative and recursive), NTP and TACACS+. All works well, across 11 or so countries.

I was about to say something about us having equal success over 105 or so countries, when I came to the realization 
that inviting quantitative comparisons of manhood with Mark is the very definition of folly.  :-)

Anyway, yeah, the folks who were scared of anycast in the 1990s were running from shadows, not basing it on experience 
or data.  In the real world, the number of stateful flows affected by route changes is dwarfed by those disrupted by 
other causes, and is immeasurably small.  And when they do crop up on the radar, it’s almost always someone’s 
equal-cost-multi-path gone wrong, rather than an actual shift.  So, not an issue at all in the real world, just in the 
imaginations of folks who thought TCP was a complex thing reserved for the specific use-cases that they’d already 
conceived of in the 1980s.  Took a while to get beyond their protestations, but here we are in the 21st century.  
Planck's principle holds.  Science progresses one funeral at a time.

                                -Bill

Attachment: signature.asc
Description: Message signed with OpenPGP


Current thread: