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Of course. Let me clarify - they use anycast DNS to send the closest CF caching proxy's IP.

• manigandham 10y ago
  That's not how it works. Both their DNS and reverse proxy servers use anycast IPs without any DNS-based routing. They did recently release some features called traffic manager that lets you control the origin server based on geo. If you just need geo-balanced DNS though, AWS Route 53, Azure Traffic Manager, and NSOne offer DNS based routing.
  • problems 10y ago
    Really? I didn't think they'd do anycast on their reverse proxy servers, that seems risky to me (ie: a TCP connection changes from one server to another due to a BGP change), but I suppose the odds are fairly low. I seem to remember getting different IPs from different locations, but it could just be random or I could be mistaken. EDIT: Tried now and it seems I'm getting the same IPs from Canada and Australia, so you are indeed correct.
    • manigandham 10y ago
      Yes, they have a big address space and announce all ips from every location: https://blog.cloudflare.com/cloudflares-architecture-eliminating-single-p/ https://blog.cloudflare.com/cloudflares-architecture-elimina... Pretty much all major CDNs use anycast today for load balancing, rolling downtime and security/ddos protection. Http/tcp connections are usually short-lived, relatively cheap to setup (since it's an edge network anyway) and BGP route updates don't happen that often. LinkedIn switched to anycast too after testing: https://engineering.linkedin.com/network-performance/tcp-over-ip-anycast-pipe-dream-or-reality https://engineering.linkedin.com/network-performance/tcp-ove...