[rpd] Anycast allocations and current policy

[Jérôme Fleury]

Hi everyone,

I'm new to this mailing-list, so please pardon any misstep.

While I have been searching discussions on this matter in this
mailing-list, I have been unable to find an adequate answer.

I'd like to discuss the relevance of AFPUB-2012-V4-001
(http://www.afrinic.net/en/library/policies/701-anycast-assignments-in-the-afrinic-region-).
In summary, it prevents companies operating anycast CDN (like mine)
from requesting anycast allocations to Afrinic because allowing only a
/24 per allocation is insufficient to meet our current expansion
needs.
Our service currently runs fully on anycast, and we use 4 times more
anycast addresses than unicast ones. We could like to expand our
service in Africa.


While having policies to discuss anycast is very much needed and
welcome, I don't agree with the following:

"In addition, current anycast practice announces an entire /24.
AFRINIC current IPv4 policy states that the minimum allocation size on
initial allocation is a /22. To use a /22 for anycast when you
potentially are only using a few addresses in the block is wasteful."

- While it's true that a lot of anycast prefixes seen in the global
routing table are /24s (for traffic-engineering purpose), this should
not be considered as a basis for this policy. I can certify that a lot
of anycast prefixes are more than /24s; for example, we advertise
/20s.

- Announcing "bigger than a /24 is wasteful" is not true in our case.
When we advertise a /20 for anycast purpose, we make sure that each
and every one of the addresses are used for production traffic. When
you serve millions of websites on your infrastructure, I can assure
you that you don't waste addresses.

After this discussion from 2007
https://lists.afrinic.net/pipermail/rpd/2007/000354.html, there hasn't
been much further discussion since. The anycast world has changed a
lot in the meantime and in my opinion this policy should be amended to
reflect today's reality of anycast addressing.

I welcome thoughts and comments.