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Networking Advanced

What is Anycast?

A network routing technique where the same IP address is announced from multiple locations, directing users to the nearest server.

Anycast assigns a single IP address to multiple servers in different geographic locations. Network routing protocols (BGP) automatically direct each user's traffic to the nearest server instance. This provides automatic load distribution, DDoS mitigation (attack traffic is absorbed across all locations), and low latency (users connect to the closest node). CDN providers, DNS services (Cloudflare, Google Public DNS), and cloud providers use anycast extensively. If one anycast node fails, traffic automatically routes to the next nearest node, providing built-in fault tolerance without client-side changes.

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