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Meet NetActuate at All Things Open 2025 in Raleigh Oct 13-14!
CDN providers can use anycast to route requests to the lowest-latency edge server, enabling faster content delivery and simpler scaling.
CDNs face challenges distributing content globally due to latency, congestion, routing inefficiencies, and maintaining consistent performance across diverse networks and regions. Managing failover, load balancing, and routing traffic to the nearest available node is complex. Anycast simplifies this by using one IP globally, automatically directing users to the closest or healthiest CDN edge, improving speed, reliability, and resilience.
Content delivery network (CDN) providers frequently use anycast to route traffic to their edge servers, providing their end users with fast performance and zero downtime. CDN providers use anycast to route users at the network level to the closest available edge server. These edge servers provide users with services that include static content caching, reverse proxy, OTT for streaming media, and/or offloading SSL. In the event one location needs to be taken offline for maintenance, upgrades, or even just crashes, users are seamlessly routed to the next, closest available location to ensure maximum availability and uptime.
Many CDN providers utilize DNS to route users to the optimal content server. For this deployment model, the anycast network routes incoming user requests to the nearest available DNS server, often hosted on virtual servers for the lowest possible latency.
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.
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.
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.
Deploy across 45+ global locations on one of the world’s largest networks, engineered for performance, resiliency, and efficient scaling without the risk of downtime or runaway costs.
