Cloudflare Load Balancing
Over-utilized or geographically distant servers add unnecessary latency and degrade the visitor experience. In many cases, unreliable or misconfigured servers drop visitor requests completely, preventing access to websites, web apps or APIs. Poor visitor experiences like these have a direct impact on revenue, reputation, and customer loyalty.
Expanding on Cloudflare’s highly available DNS infrastructure and global Anycast network, Cloudflare Load Balancing addresses these issues by providing:
- Local and global load balancing to reduce latency by load balancing traffic across multiple servers or by routing traffic to the closest geolocation region.
- Health checks with fast failover to rapidly route visitors away from failures.
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Managing Director at Active Solutions Limited
Local and Global Load Balancing to Control Traffic
Cloudflare's Load Balancing automatically reduces latency by directing visitors to infrastructure closest to them: European customers are sent to the London datacenter, Australian customers to the Sydney datacenter etc. Cloudflare Global Load Balancing runs on Cloudflare’s global Anycast network and ensures that origin requests for dynamic content are sourced from origins that are either closest to the user or meet specific weighted requirements.
Cloudflare’s Global Load Balancing runs across Cloudflare’s entire network and supports any protocol: from HTTP(S) to TCP and UDP based services via DNS or Spectrum. This minimizes friction between any existing services deployed with other cloud providers.
Chief Technology Officer at Crisp
Health Checks & Fast Failover That Circumvents DNS Propagation Delays
Cloudflare Load Balancing includes active availability monitoring that checks the health of servers from Cloudflare’s datacenters around the globe. Through periodic HTTP/HTTPS requests, monitoring can be configured for specific URLs with customizable intervals, timeouts, and status codes. Availability monitoring checks the health of origin servers as often as every 15 seconds, with reporting via email notifications and a REST API. Seconds after an origin server is marked as unhealthy, multi-region failover intelligently routes traffic to the next available server.
Cloudflare Load Balancing is powered by Cloudflare's DDoS-resilient DNS, one of the fastest DNS providers globally. When used alongside Cloudflare's reverse proxy, Cloudflare DNS changes propagate orders of magnitude faster than public DNS services since Cloudflare can avoid waiting for public time-to-lives (TTLs) to expire.
Session Affinity Without the Need for Application Changes
Session Affinity, often referred to as sticky sessions, directs all end-user requests of a session to a specific origin. Cloudflare’s Load Balancer maintains session affinity by setting a cookie with the initial response to the client. Session Affinity can be enabled through a simple configuration change in the Load Balancing application of Cloudflare’s dashboard.
Shopping carts within e-commerce stores benefit from session affinity. If an end-user adds an item to their cart, subsequent requests during the same session require the end-user to be directed to the same origin server to see the item in their cart, which can be achieved through Session Affinity.
Load Balancing Event Logs
Load Balancing event logs allow for the review and filtering of status changes of your Load Balancing origins and pools.
Multi-Cloud Reduces Lock-In and Avoids Outages
Cloudflare Load Balancing can be used across multiple cloud providers infrastructure to mitigate the impact of disruptions caused by a single provider or server.
Customers select a primary provider to direct all traffic to. Once a failure is detected, Cloudflare Load Balancing automatically routes traffic to backup providers or regions. For example, if a customer experiences outages or intermittent network connectivity in AWS, Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure, or even the customer's own infrastructure, Cloudflare Load Balancing automatically fails over to healthy providers or servers.
Key Features
Configurable health check frequencies
Fast failover (X seconds)
Session affinity (sticky sessions)
Detailed event logs of origin servers & pools
Works with Argo Smart Routing
Local and global load balancing
Health status notifications through email and REST API
Support for HTTP/S traffic
Geo-routing to origin infrastructure
Avoid DNS propagation delays
Includes DDoS protection
Fastest managed DNS globally
Integrated content delivery network (CDN)
Dynamic steering
FQDN origin resolution
Support for layer 4 traffic with Spectrum
Benefits of Cloudflare Load Balancing
Configuration Made Simple
Easy configuration through Cloudflare’s dashboard, or automation through a powerful API.
DDoS Resilient Service
Anycast network that is 15x bigger than the largest DDoS attack ever recorded ensures traffic continues to be routed even under stress.
Global DNS Network
Health checks from all of Cloudflare’s datacenters enables fast failover unbound by DNS propagation delays.
Cloudflare Features
Cloudflare's Performance and Security Services work in conjunction to reduce latency of websites, mobile applications, and APIs end-to-end, while protecting against DDoS attack, abusive bots, and data breach.
Performance
Cloudflare Performance Services improve conversions, reduce churn, and improve visitor experiences by accelerating web and mobile performance, while keeping applications available.
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Content Delivery Network (CDN)
With 180 data centers across 76 countries, Cloudflare’s Anycast CDN caches static content at the edge, reducing latency by delivering assets as close as geographically possible to visitors. -
Website Optimizations
Cloudflare includes a suite of web optimizations to improve the performance of Internet assets. Optimizations include the latest web standards, such as HTTP/2 and TLS 1.3, as well as proprietary enhancements for images and mobile device visitors. -
DNS
Cloudflare is the fastest managed DNS provider in the world, routing over 39% of all global DNS traffic. Cloudflare has multiple ways to achieve maximum performance for online assets. -
Load Balancing
Cloudflare Load Balancing provides load balancing, geo-steering, monitoring and failover for single, hybrid-cloud, and multi-cloud environments, enhancing performance and availability. -
Argo Smart Routing
Argo Smart Routing improves Internet asset performance on average of 35% by routing visitors through the least congested and most reliable paths on Cloudflare's private network. -
Railgun
Railgun compresses previously uncacheable web objects up to 99.6% by leveraging techniques similar to those used in the compression of high-quality video. This results in an average 200% additional performance increase. -
Stream
Cloudflare Stream makes streaming high quality video at scale, easy and affordable. -
Workers
Cloudflare Workers let developers run JavaScript Service Workers in Cloudflare's 180 data centers around the world. -
Mobile SDK
Cloudflare’s Mobile SDK provides visibility into application performance and load times across any global carrier network.
Security
Cloudflare Security Services reduce the risk of lost customers, declining revenues, and degraded brand by protecting against DDoS attacks, abusive bots, and data breach.
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Anycast Network
With 180 data centers across 76 countries and 30 Tbps of capacity, Cloudflare’s Anycast network absorbs distributed attack traffic by dispersing it geographically, while keeping Internet properties available and performant. -
DNSSEC
DNSSEC is the Internet’s non-spoofable caller ID. It guarantees a web application’s traffic is safely routed to the correct servers so that a site’s visitors are not intercepted by a hidden “man-in-the-middle” attacker. -
Web Application Firewall (WAF)
Cloudflare’s enterprise-grade web application firewall (WAF) detects and block common application layer vulnerabilities at the network edge, utilising the OWASP Top 10, application-specific and custom rulesets. -
Rate Limiting
Rate Limiting protects critical resources by providing fine-grained control to block or qualify visitors with suspicious request rates. -
SSL / TLS
Transport Security Layer (TLS) encryption enables HTTPS connections between visitors and origin server(s), preventing man-in-the-middle attacks, packet sniffing, the display of web browser trust warnings, and more. -
Secure Registrar
Cloudflare is an ICANN accredited registrar, protecting organizations from domain hijacking with high-touch, online and offline verification for any changes to a registrar account. -
Orbit
Cloudflare Orbit solves security-related issues for Internet of Things devices at the network level. -
Argo Tunnel
Cloudflare creates an encrypted tunnel between its nearest data center and an application’s origin server without opening a public inbound port. -
Access
Secure, authenticate, and monitor user access to any domain, application, or path on Cloudflare. -
Spectrum
Spectrum protects TCP applications and ports from volumetric DDoS attacks and data theft by proxying non-web traffic through Cloudflare’s Anycast network.
