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> It's an acceptable solution if you have nothing else. I'd argue it isn't acceptable at all in this day and age and that there are other solutions one should

> It's an acceptable solution if you have nothing else. I'd argue it isn't acceptable at all in this day and age and that there are other solutions one should pick today long before you get to the "nothing else" choice.

toast0 2y ago
Anycast is nice, but it's not something you can do yourself well unless you have large scale. You need to have a large number of PoPs, and direct connectivity to many/most transit providers, or you'll get weird routing. You also need to find yourself some IP ranges. And learn BGP and find providers where you can use it. DNS round robin works as long as you can manage to find two boxes to run your stuff on, and it scales pretty high too. When I was at WhatsApp, we used DNS round robin until we moved into Facebook's hosting where it was infeasible due to servers not having public addresses. Yes, mostly not browsers, but not completely browserless.
- latchkey 2y ago
  Back in 2013, that might have been the best solution for you. But there were still plenty of headlines... https://www.wamda.com/2013/11/whatsapp-goes-down https://www.wamda.com/2013/11/whatsapp-goes-down We're talking about today. The reason why I said Anycast is cause the vast majority of people trying to solve the need for having multiple servers in multiple locations, will just use CF or any one of the various anycast based CDN providers available today.
  - toast0 2y ago
    Oh sure, we had many outages. More outages on the one service where we tried using loadbalancers because the loadbalancers would take a one hour break every 30 days (which is pretty shitty, but that was the load balancer available, unless we wanted to run a software load balancer, which didn't make any sense). We didn't have many outages due to DNS, because we had fallback ips to contact chat in our clients. Usage was down in the 24 hours after our domain was briefly hijacked (thanks Network Solutions), and I think we lost some usage when our DNS provider was DDoSed by 'angry gamers'. But when FB broke most of their load balancers, that was a much bigger outage. BGP based outages broke everything, DNS and load balancers, so no wins there.
    - latchkey 2y ago
      > We didn't have many outages due to DNS, because we had fallback ips to contact chat in our clients. Exactly! When you control the client, you don't even need DNS. Things are actually even more secure when you don't use it, nothing to DDoS or hijack. When FB broke one set of LB's, the clients should have just routed to another set of LB's, by IP.
      - toast0 2y ago
        FB likes to break everything all at once anyway... And healtchecking the load balancers wasn't working either. So DNS to regional balancers was sending people to the wrong place, and the anycast ips might have worked if you were lucky, but you might have gotten a PoP that was broken. The servers behind it were fine, if you could get to one. You could push broken DNS responses, I suppose, but it's harder than breaking a load balancer.

toast0 2y ago

Anycast is nice, but it's not something you can do yourself well unless you have large scale. You need to have a large number of PoPs, and direct connectivity to many/most transit providers, or you'll get weird routing. You also need to find yourself some IP ranges. And learn BGP and find providers where you can use it. DNS round robin works as long as you can manage to find two boxes to run your stuff on, and it scales pretty high too. When I was at WhatsApp, we used DNS round robin until we moved into Facebook's hosting where it was infeasible due to servers not having public addresses. Yes, mostly not browsers, but not completely browserless.

latchkey 2y ago
Back in 2013, that might have been the best solution for you. But there were still plenty of headlines... https://www.wamda.com/2013/11/whatsapp-goes-down https://www.wamda.com/2013/11/whatsapp-goes-down We're talking about today. The reason why I said Anycast is cause the vast majority of people trying to solve the need for having multiple servers in multiple locations, will just use CF or any one of the various anycast based CDN providers available today.
- toast0 2y ago
  Oh sure, we had many outages. More outages on the one service where we tried using loadbalancers because the loadbalancers would take a one hour break every 30 days (which is pretty shitty, but that was the load balancer available, unless we wanted to run a software load balancer, which didn't make any sense). We didn't have many outages due to DNS, because we had fallback ips to contact chat in our clients. Usage was down in the 24 hours after our domain was briefly hijacked (thanks Network Solutions), and I think we lost some usage when our DNS provider was DDoSed by 'angry gamers'. But when FB broke most of their load balancers, that was a much bigger outage. BGP based outages broke everything, DNS and load balancers, so no wins there.
  - latchkey 2y ago
    > We didn't have many outages due to DNS, because we had fallback ips to contact chat in our clients. Exactly! When you control the client, you don't even need DNS. Things are actually even more secure when you don't use it, nothing to DDoS or hijack. When FB broke one set of LB's, the clients should have just routed to another set of LB's, by IP.
    - toast0 2y ago
      FB likes to break everything all at once anyway... And healtchecking the load balancers wasn't working either. So DNS to regional balancers was sending people to the wrong place, and the anycast ips might have worked if you were lucky, but you might have gotten a PoP that was broken. The servers behind it were fine, if you could get to one. You could push broken DNS responses, I suppose, but it's harder than breaking a load balancer.