Earlier this year after APRICOT 2018, I posted a list of visible Facebook FNA (CDN caching) nodes across the world with IPv4, IPv6 and the AS name. I got quite a few mails in following months about people mentioning that they installed nodes but do not see their names in the list (and that was normal since list was static). I re-ran my script to see emailslatest status of nodes. During last check I saw 1689 nodes (3rd March).
Just back from APRICOT 2018. As I mentioned in my previous blog post, APNIC had its first Hackathon and it was fun (blog post of APNIC here). There was one project on the ranking of CDNs using RIPE Atlas data. To achieve this team was trying to find strings/hostnames which they can trace to and figure out nearby CDN. As part of that, I suggested them to look into www.facebook.com and carefully noting the sources from where elements get loaded.
APNIC and RIPE NCC are doing a hackathon at APRICOT 2018. It just started today with some light interaction with various participating members yesterday. The theme of the hackathon is around IPv6. Many cool projects were suggested yesterday and teams started working today on certain shortlisted projects like:
A tool for ranking CDNs - A tool based on RIPE Atlas data to rank CDNs based on latency across different regions.
An excellent presentation by James Quinn from Facebook on “Being Open How Facebook Got Its Edge” at NANOG68. YouTube link here and video is embedded in the post below.
There should have been a video here but your browser does not seem to support it. Some key points mentioned by James:
BGP routing is inefficient as scale grows especially around distributing traffic. They can get a lot of traffic concentrated to a specific PoP apart from the fact that BGP best AS_PATH can simply be an inefficient low AS_PATH based path.
Some updates from personal life… I have joined Fremont based IP backbone & colocation provider - Hurricane Electric and would be working on some cool things at AS6939. :) Updates on blog… I have changed theme and entire look of blog and re-designed it with new plugins, more tweaking etc. As of now blog has more cleaner while theme which gives more space for posting, improved security with some ACLs, forced HTTPS to avoid telcos from injecting iframe in readers on 3G networks (which is very bad and worrying).