Welcome Amazon AWS AS16509 to India!

Today I spotted some routes from Amazon AWS Cloud services -  AS16509 in Indian tables. AS16509 was originating prefixes while sitting in downstream of Tata-VSNL AS4755 and Reliance AS18101. I almost missed Amazon AWS's announcement on their blog about Indian PoPs for their DNS service - Route53 and CDN service - Cloudfront.

New PoP’s of Amazon in India are at Mumbai and Chennai and I see pretty much consistent BGP announcements to Tata and Reliance from these locations. Prefixes I have seen so far:


Unicast prefixes originated in India (for Cloufront CDN):

54.230.172.0/22
54.230.188.0/22
54.239.160.0/22
54.239.188.0/22

Anycast prefixes (for anycasted DNS route 53)

205.251.192.0/23
205.251.198.0/23

Note: I pulled these prefixes by looking at upstream peers in India (which is Tata and Reliance) and running simply sh ip bgp regexp 4755 16509sh ip bgp regexp 18101 16509 on Oregon routeviews & few other major data collection points of global IPv4 table. 

I can’t see any upstream from Airtel AS9498 or any other major Indian telco. Also at NIXI prefixes are available partially. I see prefiex at NIXI Mumbai carried by Tata VSNL. At NIXI Chennai prefixes are present with one degree prepend (AS4755 AS4755 twice) making route less preferable. While at NIXI Delhi there seems no route at all for Amazon’s prefixes (Tata follows regional route policy at NIXI). 


So now big question here - which datacenter is that? 

I doubt it would be Tata or Reliance since they are core competitiors and run datacenters pretty much on their own networks with almost zero carrier neutral options (few exceptions are there). My strong guess is that it’s Netmagic’s datacenter in Mumbai and Chennai with direct upstream links (bypassing Netmagic’s network). Just my guess. Cannot verify it from record of AS16509 on peeringdb.net - http://www.peeringdb.com/view.php?asn=16509

With that being said here’s a trace to cdn.anuragbhatia.com (which I use via Amazon Cloudfront):

Anurags-MacBook-Pro:~ anurag$ traceroute -a cdn.anuragbhatia.com
traceroute: Warning: cdn.anuragbhatia.com has multiple addresses; using 54.230.189.204
traceroute to ddlfp4nmkhyfr.cloudfront.net (54.230.189.204), 64 hops max, 52 byte packets
1 [AS1] 10.0.0.1 (10.0.0.1) 1.152 ms 0.765 ms 0.627 ms
2 [AS10223] 192.168.1.1 (192.168.1.1) 1.460 ms 2.906 ms 1.569 ms
3 [AS9829] 117.218.197.1 (117.218.197.1) 16.339 ms 17.905 ms 15.704 ms
4 [AS9829] 218.248.169.118 (218.248.169.118) 94.835 ms 29.628 ms 118.135 ms
5 [AS4755] 115.114.89.21.static-mumbai.vsnl.net.in (115.114.89.21) 60.472 ms 61.304 ms 59.103 ms
6 [AS0] 172.31.19.245 (172.31.19.245) 84.706 ms 87.201 ms 85.640 ms
7 [AS4755] 115.114.130.126.static-chennai.vsnl.net.in (115.114.130.126) 82.327 ms 83.276 ms 81.583 ms
8 [AS16509] server-54-230-189-204.maa3.r.cloudfront.net (54.230.189.204) 85.261 ms 85.185 ms 84.269 ms
Anurags-MacBook-Pro:~ anurag$

Always nice to maa in all these nodes at Chennai. Basically most of companies (including Google) use 3 digit airport code in name of node (in rDNS PTR record of router’s WAN IP). For Chennai (which used to be known as Madras) airport code is still MAA and this is why you will see maa in Chennai nodes and BOM on Mumbai based nodes. :)

Time to get back to work. Have a good week ahead! :)