Frequently Asked Questions

Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) is a standardized exterior gateway protocol used to exchange routing information between different networks on the internet. It makes routing decisions based on paths, network policies, and rule-sets configured by a network admin.

Anycast networking distributes identical services across multiple global locations, with routing protocols directing users to the optimal node based on proximity and performance.

As requests arrive via a single IP address associated with an Anycast network, the network distributes the data based on prioritization, usually optimized to reduce latency by selecting the POP nearest the request.

Anycast is a network routing method where multiple servers share the same IP address, and traffic is routed to the nearest or most optimal node. It is one of the main protocol methods used in Internet Protocol (IP).

Anycast reduces latency by routing users to the nearest available server, improving page load times and responsiveness.

BGP Anycast is a network addressing and routing technique that lets multiple servers in different locations all sit behind a single IP address. Anycast leverages the BGP (Border Gateway Protocol), which is how networks exchange routing information on the internet.

Anycast inherently balances traffic by routing requests to the closest or least-congested node, reducing strain on any single server.

If one node fails, traffic is automatically rerouted to another location without interruption, maintaining uptime and service continuity.

Unicast sends traffic to a single destination, while multicast delivers traffic to a group of destinations simultaneously.

Anycast diffuses attack traffic across multiple locations, preventing any single server from being overwhelmed and improving resistance to DDoS attacks.

DNS, CDN, WAF, SASE, VPNs, and real-time APIs benefit from Anycast’s low latency, high availability, and built-in redundancy.

Unicast is ideal for one-to-one communication like web browsing. Multicast suits applications like live video streaming or real-time data distribution to multiple receivers.

To make IP addresses understandable to humans and vice versa. DNS is critical for resolving domain names quickly and reliably, which directly impacts user experience and application availability. DNS represents the “front door” to any online company’s presence on the intern

It’s a DNS infrastructure with multiple geographically dispersed nodes, reducing latency and improving fault tolerance.

Recursive DNS servers primarily store information that they’ve previously retrieved (temporarily), and when that information isn’t available in their cache, they have to get it from another server. Authoritative nameservers, on the other hand, contain up-to-date information and can provide final answers for new user queries.

The Domain Name System (DNS) translates domain names into IP addresses, enabling users to access websites and services easily. It’s the phone book of the internet.

DNS providers manage authoritative DNS servers, ensure uptime, handle routing efficiency, and often provide added features like DNS security and load balancing.

Anycast routes DNS queries to the nearest available DNS server, improving resolution speed and resilience.

Latency, regional bottlenecks, single points of failure, and capacity limits during peak demand are common DNS scaling challenges.

DNS Providers need a fast, redundant, low-latency network with nodes close to end users, ideally powered by Anycast.

Deploying globally distributed DNS with Anycast, using multiple providers, and monitoring performance helps maximize availability and resilience.

It depends on your goals. Running your own gives you control, logging and policy enforcement (e.g., filtering malicious domains), while third-party services often offer stronger global performance and built-in security features.

If all authoritative servers fail, the domain becomes unresolvable, causing service outages. Having redundant servers and failover mechanisms is critical.

An IP address is a number that is assigned to a device on a network. An IPv4 address is made up of a 32-bit numerical label consisting of four sets of numbers separated by dots. Each set can have a value between 0 and 255. However, there can only be so many unique IPv4 addresses, leading to a shortage of IPv4 addresses. This led to the creation of IPv6 addressing. IPv6 addresses are much longer, using a 128-bit numerical label. The possible combinations of IPv6 addresses is far larger allowing for more devices to be connected to the internet and larger networks to be built.

IPv6, or Internet Protocol version 6, is the newest version of the Internet Protocol (IP). The IP is a core set of rules that help regulate how data is transmitted and received over the internet. It is a foundational part of any internet service. IP provides the information needed, such device addresses and routing information, that allow data packets to travel from one device to another across a network.

You can use BGP anycast with both IPv4 and IPv6 addresses. With anycast, you can make multiple, distributed resources from a single IPv6 anycast address. One IPv6 address can belong to different nodes in a global footprint, and with anycast, incoming traffic is routed to the location nearest to them on the network.

A global edge network is geographically distributed infrastructure that delivers content and services closer to end users, reducing latency and improving performance, reliability, and availability worldwide.

Single-region deployments often suffer from higher latency and lower fault tolerance, while global footprints improve speed and redundancy but add complexity.

Peering allows networks to exchange traffic directly—helping traffic to stay local, improving speed, and reducing dependency on third-party transit providers.

A Point of Presence (POP) is a physical data center or interconnection point that provides local access to a global network.

An Internet Exchange Point (IXP) is where multiple networks interconnect and exchange traffic, optimizing routing efficiency. There are roughly 1,000 IXPs around the world.

Businesses need colocation in IXP facilities, routing expertise, and relationships with other networks for optimal traffic exchange and performance for their globally distributed applications.

While cloud providers offer robust services, cloud networks often lack the customization, control, and routing efficiency of purpose-built, globally peered networks.

You advertise the same IP address from each site (on-premises or cloud), ensure each node is healthy and online, and use Anycast routing (e.g., BGP) so clients reach the optimal node. The infrastructure then spans hybrid or multi-cloud with simplified endpoint addressing.

Anycast improves latency (pick nearest node), enhances availability (automatic reroute if one node fails), simplifies global endpoint management (single IP for multiple clouds), and supports resilience across clouds and on-premises.

Track latency and routing convergence metrics, monitor node health and traffic distribution, ensure you have visibility into which cloud/region each request is served from, and have automated fail-over/withdrawal of nodes when issues arise. Provide dashboards or logs for transparency.

You deploy nodes that advertise the same IP via BGP or other routing protocols. Once ingress occurs via the nearest node, internal tunnelling or forwarding within the overlay handles connectivity to the destination resource.

If one node fails or becomes unreachable, routing (via BGP) automatically shifts clients to a nearby healthy node. The overlay must ensure internal connectivity and state replication so services continue seamlessly.

You must monitor routing announcements, ensure nodes validate health-checks, control ingress/egress paths, and establish encryption or identity-based access inside the overlay. Since Anycast hides multiple nodes behind one IP, visibility into each node’s state is critical.

Anycast allows multiple geographically-distributed edge nodes to announce the same IP address so user requests are routed to the “nearest” available node by network topology. This reduces latency, improves fail-over/resilience, and helps distribute load and absorb DDoS attacks across the network.

If one node fails, BGP automatically reroutes traffic to another healthy node advertising the same IP. This built-in redundancy ensures continuous uptime without manual failover or complex DNS management.

Deploying Anycast requires careful BGP routing design, proper health-checks and route withdrawal, consistent node configuration, monitoring of catchments (which users go to which node), and capacity planning to avoid uneven load or routing anomalies.

No. While Anycast offers strong benefits for global scale, low latency, redundancy and static content delivery, some use-cases (very dynamic, stateful sessions, origin-specific routing, strict regional regulation) may require more granular routing, session affinity or unicast-like behaviour. Operators should evaluate traffic patterns, regional needs, and regulatory requirements.

Organizations need multiple globally distributed nodes, each announcing the same IP prefix via BGP. Reliable health checks, route monitoring, and peering with diverse networks are essential for stability and fast convergence.

Common use cases include accelerating DNS, CDN, VPN, WAF, API gateways, and SIEM ingestion, as well as improving uptime for SaaS applications and multi-cloud services.

It eliminates the need to manage BGP sessions, peerings, and route announcements. Enterprises gain global reach, simplified endpoint management, and built-in DDoS resilience through the provider’s network.

Assess the provider’s global footprint, network capacity, latency metrics, SLA guarantees, health-check automation, DDoS protection, IPv6 support, and integration options (e.g., APIs or hybrid-cloud connectivity).

Track metrics like latency, packet loss, route stability, node health, and failover response time. Use active probes and real-time telemetry to validate that Anycast consistently improves availability and user experience.

Latency, congestion, regional outages, and routing inefficiencies are common constraints in large-scale network architectures.

Major cloud outages happen multiple times per year, often affecting large geographic areas and multiple services.

Businesses can protect themselves by deploying multi-cloud strategies, Anycast routing, redundant DNS, and diverse network paths to minimize downtime.

By deploying DNS nodes in regions where users are located, businesses reduce resolution time and improve application performance.

A DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) attack floods a network or service with traffic to disrupt operations or take it offline.

Without intelligent routing like Anycast, DNS traffic may still encounter latency or single-region failures despite global deployment.

Attacks are increasing in size, frequency, and sophistication, often targeting application layers and using globally distributed botnets.

By using the same IP address from multiple geographically/­topologically dispersed nodes, traffic (including malicious traffic in a Distributed Denial-of-Service attack) can be distributed among many sites rather than funneled into one. This reduces the risk of any one node being overwhelmed.

Using the same IP address (an anycast address) advertised from multiple geographic or network locations means client connections can be routed to the closest or best-performing VPN node. This provides lower latency for users, improved availability/resilience, and better scalability and load distribution

Distributing ingestion across multiple Anycast nodes risks event duplication or misordered logs. Providers should implement event deduplication, sequence tagging, synchronized timestamps (e.g., via NTP), and centralized correlation logic.

A security first approach includes DDoS mitigation, redundant DNS, encryption, access control, and global traffic engineering for continuous protection.

By combining Anycast with real-time monitoring and layered security, businesses can ensure fast, resilient, and secure application delivery worldwide.

Benefits include automatic fail-over at the routing level, global geographic diversity, simplified endpoint addressing (one IP), and improved resilience during regional outages or large-scale incidents.

Deploy geographically diverse nodes all advertising the same IP, tie routing announcements to health status, ensure health-checks trigger route withdrawal, and test fail-over scenarios (e.g., site failure) regularly.

Track metrics like latency, traffic shifts (AS-paths), routing changes, node availability, fail-over time. Conduct drills: disable a node and verify traffic reroutes cleanly. Document which node is handling traffic from different regions.