Anycast

It acts like an autonomic nervous system for the application.

And finally, rounding out the modern cloud architecture, we have content delivery networks or CDNs and their incredible use of Anycast routing at the edge.

We touched on CDN slashing latency earlier, but the routing mechanics behind Anycast are just fascinating.

Anycast is brilliant.

In traditional Unicast routing, one IP address points to one specific physical server on Earth.

If millions of people try to hit that one IP, the server obviously melts down.

CDNs use Anycast, which completely breaks that one-to-one rule.

How so? A CDN will assign the exact same public IP address to hundreds of different edge servers located in data centers all over the world.

VPC flow logs for capturing network traffic.

And global accelerator for routing non-cacheable traffic over the AWS backbone with static Anycast IPs.

Notice the theme here.

So many network questions come down to a single distinction.