Wouter de Vries - Anycast: What is it and How to measure it

Abstract

In this talk we will take a look at Anycast, a network “technology” that —to put it bluntly— allows network operators to use the Internet as a giant load balancer. You will learn what Anycast is, how Internet users are affected by it, what problems it solves and what problems it causes.

We will start by first looking at some real-world Anycast deployments, such as the one that is deployed by Google for its public DNS resolver, and learn that Internet routing is strange. Then, we will discuss Verfploeter, a methodology to comprehensively measure the performance of an anycast network that has been applied at one of the largest anycast deployments in the world.

Biography

Wouter obtained his PhD with his thesis titled ‘Improving Anycast with Measurements’ in December 2019. Currently, he is a Systems Engineer at Cloudflare, still focusing on networks, but now from a security perspective. He has spent the past four years looking at (and researching) anycast from various angles.

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