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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A network diagnostic tool that shows the path packets take from source to destination, listing each hop along the way.

ICMP (Internet Control Message Protocol)

A network protocol used for diagnostic and error reporting, including ping and traceroute functionality.

SDN (Software-Defined Networking)

An approach that separates the network control plane from the data plane, enabling centralized, programmable network management.

The time delay between sending a request and receiving a response, measured in milliseconds.

A network communication method that sends data to multiple recipients simultaneously without duplicating packets for each recipient.

A compact method for specifying IP addresses and their associated routing prefix using a slash followed by the prefix length.

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