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Cross-regional attribution via CIDR trie

When workloads span multiple cloud regions, cross-regional IP attribution must resolve a remote IP that may belong to a workload in a different region. Two shapes are possible:

  1. Globally replicate all ownership state to every region.
  2. Locally resolve the region, then forward the attribution request.

Option 2 is the right shape when cross-regional traffic is a small fraction of all traffic (at Netflix: ~1% of flows) — global replication of high-frequency state across regions is wasteful.

CIDR trie as the dispatch primitive

Build a trie keyed on the bits of IPv4/IPv6 addresses, populated with the CIDR ranges of every regional VPC and their region tag. Looking up a remote IP walks the trie in O(address-length) and returns the owning region.

If the region is local, resolve via the in-region ownership map. If remote, forward the flow record to a node in the target region and let it do the lookup; the target region already has in-memory heartbeat state for its own IPs.

Why CIDR trie + forwarding beats global broadcast

  • Storage: one global CIDR → region trie vs. full per-IP time- range state replicated to every region.
  • Bandwidth: forward a small fraction of flows vs. broadcast every heartbeat to every region.
  • Availability: cross-region data movement only on the 1% minority; the 99% local case is unaffected by cross-region outages.
  • Consistency envelope: per-region ownership maps remain local consistency domains; cross-region lookup inherits whatever consistency the region-local state has.

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