When a request hits Stratum, it doesn't travel to a single origin. Instead, it lands on the nearest of our 30 edge points of presence — often within 20 milliseconds of the user. The magic behind this is anycast: a routing technique where the same IP address is announced from many locations at once.
Why anycast beats DNS load balancing
Traditional DNS-based balancing resolves a hostname to different IPs based on geography. It works, but it's coarse: DNS caching means users can be pinned to a far-away region for minutes. Anycast pushes the decision into the network layer, where BGP picks the shortest path for every single packet.
- No client-side caching to fight against
- Failover happens in seconds, not minutes
- A single IP simplifies firewall and allowlist rules
- Routing follows real network conditions, not a static map
Anycast turns the entire internet into your load balancer — the network does the routing so you don't have to.
Handling failover gracefully
Announcing the same prefix everywhere is only half the story. We continuously health-check each PoP and withdraw routes the instant a region degrades. Because BGP reconverges in seconds, users are silently shifted to the next-closest healthy location — no DNS TTLs, no manual intervention.
# announce the anycast prefix
$ stratum net announce 203.0.113.0/24
→ propagated to 30 PoPs in 1.2s
→ health checks active on all regionsThe result is a network that feels local everywhere. For builders, it means you ship once and your users — wherever they are — get the same fast, reliable experience.