[sdnog] Fwd: Fwd: [rpd] "Anycast Assignments in the AFRINIC region" ratified by the Board

[Nishal Goburdhan]

>     -------- Original message --------
>     From: SamiSalih
>     Date: 12/02/2015 20:01 (GMT+04:00)
>     To: sdnog at sdnog.sd
>     Subject: [sdnog] Fwd: [rpd] "Anycast Assignments in the AFRINIC region" ratified by the	Board
>
>     How this can affect us in Sudan
>
>     We are pleased to inform you that the AFRINIC Board has ratified the
>     following policy proposal:
>     ID:  AFPUB-2014-GEN-003-DRAFT-04
>     Name: Anycast Assignments in the AFRINIC region


very simply, it now allows any organisation that wants to get resources 
specifically for anycast to do this.  of course you need to be able to 
show that you are intending to run anycast, but that's not difficult.
one of the good things about this policy is that it's not restricted to 
cctlds or the like;  or even DNS (even though DNS is most often spoken 
about when people think of anycast)  so, if you thought that any of your 
IP services  needed to be anycast, you can now easily get the resources 
to do it.

note:  this is really mainly for inter-as anycast;  ie. where other 
networks see a view of your services.  using the DNS as an example, this 
would be for your auth DNS services, since, you can opt to host these 
outside your network, which is part of the intent of the policy...

this would not be necessary for infra-as anycast;  ie. anycast that you 
do inside your network only.  (in the DNS world again, that could be 
caching name-servers)  you don't need additional resources from AfriNIC 
for that, since you can de-aggregate something quite easily inside your 
network, and prevent that from leaking out.

if you were interested in anycast, you would probably need to show 
afrinic that you have:
* operations in _at least_ one place in africa
* a service to anycast (say DNS;  so provide them with a list of zones)
* where this would be anycast (so say a list of places you intend to 
have as "anycast pods" and the contracts / services to show that you 
have these in place)

there are some folks lurking here that also have lots of experience with 
anycast, so, if you are interested in doing this, perhaps posting an 
idea of what you're trying to do, will lure them out of hiding, and give 
the list a chance to hear their stories ...

anycast is really not a difficult or expensive thing to do;  there are 
many operators globally that will route your address space (/24 or /48) 
and even offer you a small VPS to run your services.  as a pet project, 
i intend to make the DNS servers that i run for friends+family personal 
domains anycast sometime this year.

i guess the question now is really, if you are running a network, why 
_aren't_ you doing this?

--n.