OARC 47 (Vancouver, BC)

A data-driven approach to migrating your DNS anycast platform

10 Nov 2026, 09:35

25m

Asia Pacific Hall (Morris J. Wosk Centre For Dialogue, SFU)

In-Person Standard Presentation Main Session OARC 47 Day 2

Speakers

Jeroen Bulten (SIDN)Mr Martijn Schmidt (i3D.net)

Description

SIDN has been operating its own DNS anycast platform for a few years using Equinix Metal. Unfortunately, Equinix decided to sunset this service mid 2026, so we were forced to migrate.

After selecting a new vendor, we decided to adopt a data-driven approach; using the well-tried Manycastr tool, we collected data from all available i3D PoPs to all resolvers querying for the .nl TLD. From this data, we predicted the optimum deployment which would minimize latency world-wide, ensure resilience and save on costs. Flow data obtained from the i3D routers corroborates our prediction that very little DNS traffic is routed sub-optimally.

To continue measuring in production, we wrote Go tooling called Tapdance. Using dnstap data, this open-source tool continues to measure latency to all active resolvers. Latency data is graphed using InfluxDB, and helps us to continue optimizing performance and resilience of the platform.