
Datapath.io: Provider-Independent Elastic IP Addresses - sspies
http://www.datapath.io/#availability
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moe
I'd suggest you scrap your "fancy" website and replace it with two paragraphs
of text that explain what you are trying to sell and how it works.

The "vague bullshit in between cute animations" approach really doesn't work
at all for this type of product.

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amenonsen
When I first saw the page (opened along with a bunch of other tabs from HN
links), with its "Timeout error!" balloon and "Service disruption" headline, I
thought it was a fancy error page and hit reload. Oops.

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icebraining
Their twitter feed has a diagram describing the process on AWS:
[https://twitter.com/datapath_io/status/560027255188250625/ph...](https://twitter.com/datapath_io/status/560027255188250625/photo/1)

EDIT another:
[https://twitter.com/datapath_io/status/559741202342625280/ph...](https://twitter.com/datapath_io/status/559741202342625280/photo/1)

~~~
wmf
This is a clever architecture; I never thought about using VPC direct connect
to get out to the Internet.

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hhw
Doesn't every CDN already accomplish the same functionality with multiple
origins and failover detection, while accelerating static content by caching
it at the edge? Given how cost competitive CDNs already are, I don't see how
they can charge a low enough cost in comparison to be compelling, while still
incurring bandwidth costs and at least some network infrastructure which make
it almost as expensive to run, minus some caching nodes. And if for whatever
reason, there does happen to be some use case for anycasting the IP that's
advantageous, any CDN could add this feature overnight while having a much
more established footprint and infrastructure in place.

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eof
> If your application goes down, all you want is to get it back up. What if
> your cloud provider is down? Use DATAPATH.IO to route your users to a
> healthy location while keeping your IP addresses.

But... what happens if datapath.io goes down?

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mmastrac
I think the idea is that datapath only functions when you go down. ie: if only
you go down, datapath will fix it via BGP magic. If datapath is down and you
are up, stuff continues to work.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?x-yt-
ts=1422411861&feature=pla...](https://www.youtube.com/watch?x-yt-
ts=1422411861&feature=player_embedded&x-yt-cl=84924572&v=tsXpQHi7Udo)

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chrisfarms
I assume this is BGP routing as a service (which sounds cool).

But, would this not break the internet if everyone used it? routing individual
IPs (rather than large blocks) sounds like it would end in chaos?

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bdonlan
In general, most ISPs will drop any routes more specific than a /24\.
Presumably datapath has negotiated with some specific providers to allow /32s;
it's up to that ISP to scale their routers to handle it; other ISPs will only
see the /24 aggregate.

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rev_bird
> What if your cloud provider is down? Use DATAPATH.IO to route your users to
> a healthy location while keeping your IP addresses.

Call me crazy, but I'm not sure I really _care_ about keeping my IPs. Route 53
seems as close to bulletproof as we're going to find with DNS, and it's got
cloud-independent failover routing built in. Point the primary record at your
nice little EC2 server, and have the secondary record pointing as Azure or
Google Cloud or your mom's laptop, whatever, and it'll do what Datapath is
doing without futzing with your routing. ...right?

~~~
sspies
You cannot do graceful failovers with Route 53. This is, because DNS is a
system of many dependend caching layers and the TTL value is not realiable.

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moe
_the TTL value is not realiable._

How is the TTL not reliable?

In my personal experience DNS cut-overs have never been a problem. Is there
any major OS or ISP doing DNS wrong?

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sspies
We have seen providers set the TTL value to 300 seconds no matter what. Chrome
has been caching names forever while running...just two examples

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wmf
Do you have to pay for your traffic twice?

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api
... and does this add hops?

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sspies
Id adds one hop (our appliance) to the path. It tries to increase performance
of your path by taking non-standard BGP metrics into account: congestion and
latency

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moe
Does that mean all traffic passes through your appliance?

Where is it physically located, what about congestion of the appliance itself,
what are your peerings?

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sspies
Traffic passes the appliance at the edge of the hosting provider. It takes
congestion at all links and the appliance itself into account and re-routes
accordingly. Depending on the characteristics of the location, at least three
very unsimilar transit connections are used.

~~~
moe
_at least three very unsimilar transit connections are used._

What does transit mean in this context; like between my VPC and your
appliance? Can you give an example for e.g. an AWS region?

How is the appliance implemented, is it physical hardware, EC2 instances? Is
it redundant, how do you scale it in terms of bandwidth?

~~~
sspies
Transit providers sell access to the whole internet to us. We are in
negotitations with them, but we will be more specific, once we have the
commitments. Technically, we choose at least three different providers, so our
appliance has a good basis of decision-making. For the connection between your
VPC and our appliance, we use the regular AWS DC API.

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Coldewey
Thats very cool

