What’s anycast?

I don’t care where the servers are located. I’m just thinking that it’ll work best to dedicate a specific server to serving individual geographic areas.

It’s more of a routing question, not a hosting question.

-David

On Aug 7, 2014, at 11:48 PM, Bryan O'Neal <Bryan.ONeal@theonealandassociates.com> wrote:

Sounds perfect for anycast. Many small packets, no sessions or contracts, etc. However one cluster in LA, Seattle, Dallas, Ashburn, and Chicago will provide exquisite northern American coverage. You don't put them where the people are you put them where the network is.

On Aug 7, 2014 11:24 PM, "David Schwartz" <newsletters@thetoolwiz.com> wrote:

I appreciate all of the comments. Some made sense and some were a bit over my head. I’ve only ever had to deal with a single server that required a pair of nameserver names, so most of this is relatively new to me. (All of my sites today are on a shared reseller hosting account.)

A few more details might be helpful.

The incoming requests will all be fairly small. Aside from the headers and API keys, the data will be under 100 bytes.

At first, the servers will simply take the data and stuff it into a database, then send a simple 200 status response.

Down the line, the server processes will do some simple queries, then send a custom status response code and possibly a reply message of a dozen or so bytes. The vast majority of repiles will be a simple status response. In the rare situation where we’ll need to send more data, a 302/307 redirect to a process running on a different server would suffice.

We’ll need to run our own app to do this. Again, it’s fairly simple. Someone suggested that launching PHP would be a lot of overhead. Perhaps a custom ISAPI module (or whatever they’re called these days) would work.

As far as geo-locality, we’re looking at major metropolitan areas, like Phoenix, Tucson, Flagstaff, Las Vegas.  High-density areas like LA and San Diego, and cities on the East Coast, might get split into a few smaller areas, but that would only be done after operational tests showed it would be beneficial.

-David

On Aug 7, 2014, at 10:40 PM, Eric Cope <eric.cope@gmail.com> wrote:

I'm not sure if its what you are looking for, but I read this on Hacker News the other day:
http://www.scalescale.com/rolling-your-own-cdn-build-a-3-continent-cdn-for-25-in-1-hour/

Eric

On Thu, Aug 7, 2014 at 8:38 PM, Joseph Sinclair <plug-discussion@stcaz.net> wrote:

In reference to your final sentence, you're looking for the kind of services a CDN provides.
(e.g. geographic routing, and rapid scale).  Something like one of the following combinations may offer what you need (using the technologies others have mentioned already):

AWS with Amazon CloudFront (if your content is static)
AWS or ComputeEngine with LimeLight Networks (for static content it's simple, but they can do dynamic, different for each request, as well for a higher fee).
AWS or ComputeEngine with Akamai (same as LimeLight, simple for static or they can also do dynamic for higher fees).

AWS or ComputeEngine without CDN, This can be very coarse-grained in that requests from a geographic region will (preferentially) go to the datacenter in that region.
So you could differentiate Asia, Europe(EMEA, really), US-East, and US-West with the AWS or GCE zones.

Hopefully those suggestions help; there are many other combinations of compute and CDN offerings, but those above represent the top two providers in each category.

If you needed to go it yourself, you could use something like the geoip database (there are a few providers) to match IP to geography.  That's not hugely reliable, but it's about as good as you'll get on a global internet where people travel and sometimes use things like Tor to hide their origin.
If you're on mobile, why not just tag the request with location from the mobile device?  That would be much more reliable than any of the other options.

If you're needing very precise control, then you could use the mobile location information in a simple router service (something like NGinx or similar with a basic region-to-server mapping) to redirect the request to the correct locality server.

If you're looking for extremely small (neighborhood or smaller) areas and it's a mobile app, there are also geofencing services (similar to Android's built-in services, see http://developer.android.com/training/location/geofencing.html) that identify fairly precise location and help serve different content based on that.

Hopefully one of those options helps point you in the direction of what you need.

On 08/06/2014 11:17 PM, David Schwartz wrote:
> Here�s something interesting for the infrastructure geeks on the list ...
>
> How would you approach setting up a service that had to sink around, oh � say � 10-20 million small HTTP POST requests per minute throughout the day, from sources geographically distributed around the country?
>
> To do development and get the logic working, a small server is sufficient. But it needs to scale quickly once it�s launched.
>
> There will be a high degree of geo-locality, so servers could be set up to handle requests from different geographic areas.  HTTP requests from a given area would be routed to whatever server is dedicated for that area. I guess their IP address could be used for that purpose?
>
> (How granular is the location data for IP addresses on mobile devices? Are they reliable? We could add a location geotag to the packet headers if that would help.)
>
> Note that the servers don�t need to be physically LOCATED in the area; rather, they're dedicated to SERVING a well-defined geographic area.
>
> There�s no need for cross-talk, either. That is, there�s no need for a server serving, say, the LA area to cross-post with one in San Diego, except in a very small overlapping area which is easy to address.
>
> Can this sort of routing be done with a DNS service?  (eg., DNSMadeEasy.com is one I�m familiar with)
>
> Or is something more massive needed?
>
> Also note that this would be an automated service. It has a very steady stream of small incoming packets, peaking at various times of the day, with limited responses. No ads, no graphics, no user interactions at all.
>
> I know there are infrastructure services in place to handle this kind of thing, like what Amazon offers, and others. I�m looking for any specific pointers to services that might fit this use case profile.
>
> -David
>
>
>
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