LOCAL PREFERENCE IN ANYCAST CDN ROUTING

Embodiments herein describe a CDN where anycast routing is used to identify a load balancer for selecting a cache in the CDN to use to deliver a requested object to a user. In one embodiment, the user performs a DNS lookup to identify an anycast IP address for a plurality of load balancers in the CDN. The user can then initiate anycast routing using the anycast IP address to automatically identify the closest load balancer. Once the identified balancer selects the cache, the load balancer can close the anycast connection with the user device and use an HTTP redirect to provide the user device with a unicast path to the selected cache. The user device can then establish a unicast connection with the cache to retrieve (e.g., stream) the object.