Anycast as a Load Balancing feature

[angelicagardner]

Anycast as a Load Balancing feature

Author(s): Fernanda Weiden and Peter Frost
Link: https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.5555/1924976.1925002

Abstract

Our IT organization is made up of many sub-teams, each providing a service such as DNS, LDAP, HTTP proxy, and so on. Each one is deployed globally, using their own replication mechanisms. Our team provides Load Balancing and failover services in a way that other teams can use without having to manage the underlying technology. We recently added Anycast as a service we offer to other teams that need to be able to failover between Load Balancers. While Anycast is complex and mysterious to many systems administrators, our architecture provides the service in a way that the other teams do not need to worry about the details. They simply provide the service behind Load Balancers they currently use, with an additional virtual IP address. This paper describes how Anycast works, it's benefits, and the architecture we used to provide Anycast failover as a service.

DOI

10.5555/1924976.1925002