A Brief Primer on Anycast

What this post added

This post introduces and explains the Anycast routing scheme, contrasting it with Unicast. It details how Anycast enables multiple machines to share a single IP address, with routers directing traffic to the closest machine. The benefits of Anycast for Cloudflare are highlighted: speed (reduced latency by serving requests from the edge), resiliency (traffic automatically reroutes around data center outages), and attack mitigation (distributed nature absorbs DDoS attacks). The post also touches on the complexity of implementing Anycast, requiring ownership of hardware, direct carrier relationships, and route tuning.