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πŸ’Š Anycast Healthchecker

Note

this component is not deployed in a standalone-server instance. Instead, it act as a service component in Load Proxy Servers with anycast IP address advertised to BGP peers.

Certain Load Proxy nodes are deployed with Anycast IP addresses, serving as globally distributed ingress points for edge traffic.

These nodes use BIRD (a dynamic routing daemon) to establish BGP sessions with upstream border routers and advertise their assigned Anycast prefixes.

To enhance availability and routing accuracy, EdgeHit integrates the open-source anycast-healthchecker module developed by Google.

πŸ”§ Functionality

  • Periodically checks the health of local services β€” most importantly, the NGINX process.
  • If a monitored process fails (e.g., NGINX is unresponsive), it:
  • Signals BIRD to withdraw the BGP route advertisement, preventing further traffic from being routed to the faulty node.
  • Once recovery is detected, it re-announces the prefix, allowing the node to rejoin the Anycast pool.

🧠 This mechanism ensures self-healing Anycast failover, meaning traffic is routed only to healthy and available nodes.

πŸ“¦ Components

  • bird β€” BGP daemon that handles route advertisement.
  • anycast-healthchecker β€” Python-based module for monitoring service health and interacting with BIRD.