Unbuckling the narrow waist of IP: Addressing Agility for Names and Web Services

IP addressing stifles innovation in network- and web-oriented services due to the need for architectural changes and planning for migration. The traditional approach of binding IP addresses to names and resources creates limitations on content hosting, distribution, and service providers. Addressing Agility is an innovative solution that decouples IP addresses from names and processes, allowing any address to be used to reach a name as long as it's reachable at an address. This approach enables new systems and architectures, such as DNS-based load balancing and policy-based randomized addresses. Cloudflare has been working with Addressing Agility live at the edge since June 2020, serving over 20 million hostnames and services from a single IP address.