Ensure Application Availability
Improve the availability of applications affected by overloaded or unavailable infrastructure.
Users expect their mission-critical applications to always be online and available. Internet applications deployed on a global scale are highly susceptible to outages or downtime due to spikes in traffic, high network latency or server outages at the origin. Cloudflare improves application availability by monitoring network latency and server health at the origin, identifying the best resource from which to serve user requests for dynamic content.
Global Scale
Cloudflare’s global Anycast network spans 200 cities in 90 countries, offering a scalable infrastructure backbone that prevents downtime and unavailability.
Ease of Use
Setting up Cloudflare takes as little as 5 minutes. The easy-to-use dashboard enables quick configuration of fine-grained functionalities to improve the availability and performance of Internet properties.
Integrated Security & Performance
Cloudflare includes integrated security services to defend against DDoS attacks, customer data breaches, and abusive bots, while preventing performance trade-offs.
Challenges Affecting Application Availability
Traffic Overload
Both expected and unexpected network congestion or overloaded infrastructure can degrade performance to a point where websites or applications stop responding.
Interactivity and Personalization
Applications or individual origin servers can experience unplanned downtime and hard-to-troubleshoot outages, preventing visitors from accessing assets. Unplanned downtime includes hardware failures or system failures due to misconfiguration.
Disaster Recovery and In-House Load Balancing
Assets can also go offline for reasons unrelated to the network, such as manual and error prone disaster recovery or in-house load balancing, resulting in often hard-to-troubleshoot outages involving expensive triage.
Cloudflare Availability Services
By protecting the origin from being overloaded and redirecting traffic around congested networks and away from failed servers to healthy origins, Cloudflare improves availability of applications.
Key Results
- Reductions in latency by 2 - 3 seconds through Global Load Balancing
- I'm Under Attack Mode mitigated DDoS attacks without any disruption in service
- Affordably scaled internationally while maintaining local infrastructure
Read the Case Study
Valérian Saliou
CTO
More Cloudflare Performance Use Cases
Accelerate Internet Applications
Heavy pages and long distances from the origin slow down Internet applications. Accelerate the delivery of static and dynamic content for higher conversions, better engagement, and lower infrastructure, operational, and development costs.
Accelerate Mobile Experiences
Mobile clients introduce performance and content delivery constraints which hurt user experiences. Deliver fast mobile experiences that increase engagement and conversions, regardless of distance to origin servers, device types, or network health.
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)
Spanning 200 cities across 90 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. 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 30% by routing visitors through the least congested and most reliable paths on Cloudflare's private network. -
Railgun™
Railgun compresses previously unreachable web objects by leveraging techniques similar to those used in the compression of high-quality video. This can result in 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 global cloud network across 200 cities. -
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 200 cities across 90 countries and 35 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 Layer Security (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.
1 IDC, DevOps and the Cost of Downtime: Fortune 1000 Best Practice Metrics Quanti ed, Stephen Elliot, March 2015
