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.
Speed
Real-time traffic acceleration to route around network congestion
Security
DDoS protection with over 192 Tbps of mitigation capacity
Reliability
Global and local load balancing with fast failover
"Cloudflare Spectrum helped us really boost the performance and resiliency of our custom TCP protocols."
Ben Burns
CIO, ESL – Turtle Entertainment Online
Fast. Secure. Reliable. Pick three.
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.
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.
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 of millions of 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 192 Tbps, instant threat detection, a time to mitigate (TTM) under 3 seconds 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 285 cities in 100 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 allow or deny individual IPs or IP ranges to granularly control 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 and 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 and 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 270 ms for us. With Argo enabled, we saw reductions down to around 250 ms 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."
James Ross
CTO
Key Features
Forrester named Cloudflare a “Leader” in DDoS mitigation
Cloudflare has been recognized as a Leader in the 2021 Forrester Wave™: DDoS Mitigation Solutions. Cloudflare achieved the highest scores across fifteen evaluation criteria, including:
- Product vision
- Performance
- Speed of implementation
- Response automation
- Security operations centers