Anycast but for egress

Wed Jul 28 14:21:05 UTC 2021

On Wed, Jul 28, 2021 at 6:04 AM Vimal <j.vimal at gmail.com> wrote:
> My intention is to run a web-crawling service on a public cloud. This service
> is geographically distributed, and therefore will run in multiple regions
> around the world inside AWS... this means there will be multiple AWS VPCs,
> each with their own NAT gateway, and traffic destined to websites
> that we crawl will appear to come from this NAT gateway's IP address.

Hello,

AWS does not provide the ability to attach anycasted IP addresses to a
NAT gateway, regardless of whether it would work, so that's the end of
your quest.

> The reason I want a predictable IP is to communicate this IP to website
> owners so they can allow access from these IPs into their networks.
> I chose IP as an example; it can also be a subnet, but what I don't want to
> provide is a list of 100 different IP addresses without any predictability.

If you bring your own IP addresses, you can attach a separate /24s of
them to your VPCs in each region, providing you with a single
predictable range of source addresses. You will find it difficult and
expensive to acquire that many IP addresses from the regional
registries for the purpose you describe.

Silly question but: for a web crawler, why do you care whether it has
the limited geographically distribution that a cloud service provides?
It's a parallel batch task. It doesn't exactly matter whether you have
minimum latency.

Regards,
Bill Herrin

-- 
William Herrin
bill at herrin.us
https://bill.herrin.us/