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Pretty close! We don't actually use GeoIP at the DNS level, we use the routing table of the internet to direct people to the closest location we have to them b
by benjojo12 11y ago
Pretty close!
We don't actually use GeoIP at the DNS level, we use the routing table of the internet to direct people to the closest location we have to them by announcing the same IP addresses in the routing table in many places (eg, anycast) You can find a blog post primer and general more explanation here: https://blog.cloudflare.com/cloudflares-architecture-eliminating-single-p/ https://blog.cloudflare.com/cloudflares-architecture-elimina...
the upshot of this is that TCP and SSL connections start faster because of lower latency to our location, and we can pull items out of cache faster and give them to the client.
- andrewstuart2 11y agoAwesome, thanks for the additional info. On a related note, I really appreciate how good CloudFlare is about knowledge sharing. Not a lot of companies would be so willing to share information that's so integral to their business.
- Hello71 11y agoalthough it's useful to note that use of anycast is impossible to hide. any looking glass will tell you that CF has tons of routes to each apparent IP, e.g. https://ssp.pme.gin.ntt.net/lg/lg.cgi?query=bgp&sourceIP=IP&addr=198.41.191.47&router=Ashburn,+VA+-+US https://ssp.pme.gin.ntt.net/lg/lg.cgi?query=bgp&sourceIP=IP&...
- fapjacks 11y agoOn the other hand, they do some stupid stuff, disregarding the standard and how useful it is [0]. [0] https://blog.cloudflare.com/deprecating-dns-any-meta-query-type/ https://blog.cloudflare.com/deprecating-dns-any-meta-query-t...
- MichaelGG 11y agoDisregarding standards is not uncommon when you're actually running a high-performance system that faces attacks. Plenty of stuff goes into specs that just doesn't make sense while operating. Their explanation of why they are disabling ANY seems perfectly fine.
- fapjacks 11y agoAll I can see is that you've never needed to debug problems with DNS.