Anycast is not magic. A request still lands on one machine; the trick is picking a nearby one and keeping the cache hot enough that origin sees a fraction of the traffic.
POP operators used to measure success in hits. Now it is tail latency: the 99th percentile of a cache miss under a regional spike. SSDs helped. Smarter eviction helped more.
TLS tickets and session resumption cut handshake time on mobile networks where RTT dominates. Most of the page weight is still images and third-party scripts, not the HTML you are reading.
We keep a short public log of incidents and capacity work. Nothing proprietary — just the kind of notes a small edge team would pin on the wall.
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