HTTP Anycast

Conditions

You can use the CloudFlow Anycast networks to route traffic to your application. Our Anycast networks are avaialble to Enterprise plans and is recommended when all of the following are true:

• your site domain is a zone apex (aka bare domain), e.g. <your-domain-name>.com instead of www.<your-domain-name>.com, and
• your DNS hosting does not support using an ANAME or ALIAS record at the zone apex to simulate a CNAME record, and
• you cannot change your DNS hosting to another DNS provider that does support ANAME records.

LocationOptimizer configuration

To use Anycast on CloudFlow, you must set your location-optimizer configuration to use the anycast policy. The anycast policy has a required parameter called network. The network parameter indicates which anycast IP you will be using (see below). The default value for the network parameter is "global-045".

A minimal LocationOptimizer configuration for anycast looks like this:

minimal locationOptimizer.json

{
  "strategy":"SolverServiceV1",
  "params":{
    "policy":"anycast"
  }
}

The minimal configuration is equivalent to:

equivalent locationOptimizer.json

{
  "strategy":"SolverServiceV1",
  "params":{
    "policy":"anycast",
    "network":"global-045"
   }
}

An alternative configuration is:

equivalent locationOptimizer.json

{
  "strategy":"SolverServiceV1",
  "params":{
    "policy":"anycast",
    "network":"global-103"
  }
}

Anycast Networks and IP addresses

Both anycast networks are suitable to global traffic and the global-045 network is preferred for the majority of customers. However, if you have a preponderance of traffic in Australia and would benefit from finer geographic resolution there, then the global-103 network would be desirable.

The table below shows the IP address that you would enter into your DNS records to access these networks:

Network	IP Address
global-045	45.154.183.183
global-103	103.107.226.226