Cloudflare Spectrum

The Internet is more than the web. It comprises many other TCP/ UDP applications that have the same fundamental needs as web services – speed, security, and reliability.

Cloudflare Spectrum is a reverse proxy product that extends the benefits of Cloudflare to all TCP/UDP applications.

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Speed

Real-time traffic acceleration to route around network congestion

Security

DDoS protection with over 37 Tbps of mitigation capacity

Reliability

Global and local load balancing with fast failover

Fast. Secure. Reliable. Pick 3.

Custom gaming application? Spectrum will ensure it’s lightning-fast for all your global users. Want to ensure the security and uptime of your financial trading software? Spectrum will do just that, even at peak trading hours.

It's easy to use.

We aim to build products that solve complex problems and are also surprisingly easy to use. Spectrum can be configured with a few clicks right from the dashboard or API. You build the app, we handle the rest.

Better apps, lower cost.

It’s best-in-class networking, without the hardware. WAN acceleration, DDoS mitigation, and load balancing appliances need racking, stacking and cabling that also involve high CAPEX costs. With Spectrum, pay for only what you use, without the hardware maintenance costs.

Cloudflare Spectrum helped us really boost the performance and resiliency of our custom TCP protocols.

Ben Burns
CIO, ESL – Turtle Entertainment Online

Real-time traffic acceleration

Speed is an integral part of many applications. Often, applications such as RDP, VoIP, RTMP or custom financial and gaming applications require low end-to-end network latency to deliver consistent, reliable, and ‘real-time’ experiences to end-users.

Cloudflare Spectrum integrates with Argo Smart Routing to send TCP traffic faster than the ‘best-effort’ Internet. Cloudflare’s network learns from the traffic that spans 27,000,000 Internet properties, enabling machine-learning (ML) based intelligent routing around network congestion in real-time.

Based on synthetic measurement tests between Western America and Singapore, we saw a nearly 17% decrease in the TCP roundtrip time (RTT) on Cloudflare's network when compared to sending the traffic directly on the Internet.

Best-in-class DDoS protection

With a network mitigation capacity of over 37 Tbps, instant threat detection, and < 10 sec time to mitigate (TTM) for most threats, Spectrum proxies and protects your applications against the most sophisticated and multi-vector DDoS attacks. With a network of data centers that spans over 200 cities in 95 countries, Spectrum is well-positioned to stop DDoS attacks in the cloud closest to the attack source, well before they reach your application server.

IP Firewall included

Spectrum comes with a completely software-defined IP firewall that can be configured right from the dashboard or API. You can whitelist or blacklist individual IPs or IP ranges to granularly allow or block traffic to your application server. You can also configure rules to block visitors from a specified country or even an Autonomous System Number (ASN).

Increased reliability with faster failovers.

In the event of a downtime, all active TCP connections and UDP traffic automatically failover to an alternate healthy server in a configured load balancing pool to prevent downtime. By dynamically distributing it to the most available and responsive server pools, Cloudflare Spectrum and Load Balancing together help increase the uptime of your services.

"Before Spectrum, we had to rely on unstable services & techniques that increased latency, worsening user's experience. Now, we're able to be continually protected without added latency, which makes it the best option for any latency & uptime sensitive service such as online gaming."

Bruce Blair
Chief Technology Officer

Real-time analytics

Get in-depth information on ingress, egress traffic, and threats mitigated using Spectrum.

See real-time data transfer (ingress and egress) as well as the no. of concurrent connections to your service
Request detailed log data on every single connection event using a RESTful API
Automate log data delivery to a cloud storage provider of your choice

From a latency perspective, we saw improvements when using Argo coupled with Spectrum - in more remote regions like Australia, the improvements were more noticeable. For example, without Argo, round-trip messages from Australia to Chicago would take on average around 270ms for us. With Argo enabled, we saw reductions down to around 250ms consistently. This means that on average, our customers in Australia see around ~7% improvement in request response times when managing their game servers in Australia.