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 a load balancer. Once the identified balancer selects the cache, the load balancer can close the anycast connection with the user device and use a 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.