Technical Summary
This document describes the use of anycast for both local scope
distribution of services using an Interior Gateway Protocol and
global distribution using BGP. Many of the issues for
monitoring and data synchronisation are common to both, but
deployment issues differ substantially.
The document considers the design of anycast services, including
considerations of protocol suitability, routing considerations,
addressing considerations and multi-service configurations, as
well as service management issues.
Working Group Summary
The document was adopted as a GROW WG document in February 2005,
and further revised in accordance with WG comments.
The WG position was a general consensus, with some residual
points of dissension within the working group from a single
party.
Protocol Quality
David Kessens reviewed this document for the IESG.
Note to RFC Editor
Please insert at the beginning of Section 1:
This document is addressed to network operators who are
considering whether to deploy or operate a distributed service using
anycast. It describes the best current practice for doing so, but does
not recommend whether any particular service should or should
not be deployed using anycast.
Please insert at the end of Section 4.1:
Operators should be aware that, especially for long running flows,
there are potential failure modes using anycast that are more complex
than a simple 'destination unreachable' failure using unicast.