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Comment by andreareina | Hacker News Reader

Is assigning multiple nodes the same routable address and using BGP to route to the closest a thing anywhere else? Is there anywhere I could read more about it? It seems (to my naïve mind) like something that could have some impressively annoying failure modes but I'm sure the engineers have thought it through.

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You could deploy your own: https://github.com/google/seesaw | how-to: https://render.com/blog/how-to-build-an-anycast-network

Or have someone else deploy it for you: https://www.vultr.com/docs/configuring-bgp-on-vultr/ | https://netactuate.com/anycast/

All big cloud providers have anycast load balancer offerings. In my experience, Fly's load balancer is wayy more simpler than those to use (because it is the only way to load balance, like with Cloudflare).

You can bring your own AS quite easily at a couple of places such as vultr. I heard TCP works surprisingly well over anycast as routes are more static than one would fear.

Note that in the case of fly you don't directly get traffic to an anycast IP but through a reverse proxy.

I could imagine that they replicate connection states to all pops so that traffic that arrives in the wrong pop can be rerouted.

It's really common for CDNs. Definitely for DNS and almost always for http. Anycast routing.

In the past people were concerned more about route flapping disrupting TCP connections. It seems that people aren't worried about that anymore. Google does it.

> Anycast routing

Aha, that brings up technical articles, thanks. TFA does mention it multiple times so mea culpa.

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