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.
Already a Cloudflare customer? Activate Load Balancing
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: send European customers to the London datacenter, Australian customers to the Sydney datacenter, and anywhere in-between. Load Balancing builds on top of Cloudflare’s Anycast network, allowing for quick delivery of static assets through Cloudflare's CDN, and reducing latency for dynamic requests by keeping visitors close to your infrastructure.
Cloudflare’s global Load balancing operates at the DNS-level and supports any protocol: from HTTP(S) through to TCP and UDP -based services. This allows for usage with existing services or in conjunction with other cloud providers, be it compute, storage, or any combination thereof.
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.
Multi-cloud and Hybrid Cloud Support to Avoid Outages
Cloudflare Load Balancing can be used across multiple cloud providers or on-premise 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.
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 10X 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.
Already a Cloudflare customer? Activate Load Balancing
Making the Internet Work the Way It Should for Anything Online
Cloudflare speeds up and protects millions of websites, APIs, SaaS services, and other properties connected to the Internet. Our Anycast technology enables our benefits to scale with every server we add to our growing footprint of data centers.
Performance
Cloudflare is dedicated to enabling the best possible performance for our customers. Our global network speeds up and streamlines connections from visitors to their online destinations in a number of key ways:
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CDN
Moving content physically closer to visitors with our CDN is one of easiest way to improve the performance of your website and reduce load on your web servers. -
Website Optimization
Cloudflare lets you automatically enable the latest in web technologies. Our web optimization features cover everything from mobile image optimization to aggressive GZIP and HTTP/2. -
DNS
Cloudflare is one of the fastest managed DNS providers in the world. The same 115 data center network that powers our CDN dramatically speeds up domain resolution for your website’s visitors. -
Load Balancing
Cloudflare Load Balancing provides load balancing, geo-steering, monitoring and failover for your Internet facing infrastructure enhancing service availability. -
SSL
Modern SSL isn’t just for security—it can actually improve the performance of your website by leveraging features like OCSP stapling, session resumption, HTTP/2, and TLS 1.3.
Security
As applications move to the cloud, their security needs to move with them. Cloudflare’s security services operate at the edge of the network, making it possible to identify and mitigate threats faster than on-premise solutions.
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DDoS Protection
Our enterprise-class DDoS protection network has 20 times more capacity than the largest DDoS attack ever recorded. Operating at the network edge, it protects against all forms of DDoS attacks. -
WAF
Our web application firewall benefits from the collective intelligence of our entire network. When we identify a new threat from one website, we can automatically block it from the other 6 million websites on our network. -
Secure Registrar
Registering your domain through Cloudflare is the most secure way to protect your trademark from domain hijacking. -
Dedicated SSL Certificates
With a few clicks within the Cloudflare dashboard, you can easily and quickly issue new certificates, securely generate private keys and more. Dedicated SSL Certificates are available for purchase on all Cloudflare pricing plans. -
Rate Limiting
Rate Limiting gives you granular controls to detect bad traffic, customized rulesets to ensure that your legitimate visitors are not impacted, and insights to improve your security posture as attacks evolve.
Next Stop for Great Rail Journeys - Cloudflare Load Balancing
Presented by Christian Paulus and Nigel Hepworth | Tuesday, June 6th, 2017, 1:00 PM EDT