IPV6 Anycast for streaming

Sun Aug 12 19:15:03 UTC 2012

From: Voice of the Blind ™ Network Operation <noc () vobradio org>
> Hello, is a anycasted Prefix a good idea for Streaming?

Maybe. I've used TCP anycast-based CDNs (CacheFly 
and MaxCDN/NetDNA), and they work very well.

I observe they generally work something like this:

1. DNS resolution with long TTLs returning anycasted IPs.

2. Smaller HTTP requests served directly from anycast IP 
with http keepalives enabled.

3. Large objects and streams do an application layer 
redirect (HTTP or whatever stream protocol) to a DNS 
name that returns unicast IPs for the node you 
initially reached via anycast.

I would recommend looking at CDNs however, as 
this is an area where scale does matter and you 
will find it very difficult to do this better or cheaper 
yourself.