Guides
In-depth technical guides and reference architectures for NetActuate services. These guides cover networking concepts, design patterns, automation workflows, and best practices that apply across multiple products.
Getting Started
- Compute Node Quickstart — fastest path to running VMs on NetActuate, with Ansible or Terraform
- AI-Assisted Provisioning — use Claude Code, Cursor, or Copilot to deploy VMs and anycast clusters
- End-to-End Anycast Global Deployment — end-to-end guide from account setup through BGP validation
Automation Patterns
- Terraform + Ansible Handoff — provision with Terraform, configure with Ansible using the inventory output pattern
- CI/CD Integration — patterns for deploying to NetActuate infrastructure from GitHub Actions, GitLab CI, and other pipeline tools
Anycast and BGP
- ECMP Load Balancing — how equal-cost multipath routing distributes traffic across multiple servers at a single location
- Redundant Anycast Groups — designing primary, secondary, and tertiary anycast architectures for DNS and other services
- Mixed Provider Anycast — best practices for announcing the same prefix from NetActuate alongside other network providers
- Bring Your Own IP — using your own IP address space on the NetActuate network
Service Architectures
- Anycast DNS with KnotDNS — production-grade anycast DNS using KnotDNS across 30+ PoPs
- Kubernetes Anycast with k3s — self-managed k3s with MetalLB BGP for anycast service IPs
- Kubernetes Anycast with BGP Controller — automated BGP anycast on Kubernetes with health-based failover
VM Build Options
- Building VMs with Cloud-Init — pass cloud-init or bash scripts at build time via the API
- Building VMs with Firewall Sets — apply firewall rules before the VM is reachable
- Building VMs with Multiple NICs and VLANs — attach secondary NICs to Cloud VLANs at build time
- Using Secrets Manager with Cloud-Init — inject credentials into cloud-init without plaintext storage
- Advanced VM Build — complete build request combining firewall, cloud-init, secrets, and VLANs
Infrastructure and Security
- DDoS Best Practices — layered DDoS mitigation model and Anycast group design for attack resilience
- Redundancy Layers — understanding the multiple layers of redundancy built into the NetActuate infrastructure stack
- VM Scaling — vertical scaling (resize CPU/RAM) and horizontal autoscaling (auto-provision VMs with BGP/ECMP)
- VPU Encoding with NETINT Quadra — deploy a VM with a NETINT Quadra VPU and run hardware-accelerated video encoding with FFmpeg