Introducing Load Balancing & Intelligent Failover with Cloudflare

Cloudflare's Enterprise customers have been using our Load Balancing service since March, and it has been helping them avoid website downtime caused by unreliable hosting providers, Internet outages, or servers. Today, we're bringing Load Balancing to all of our customers.

Even the best caching can't escape the fundamental limitations on performance created by the speed of light. Using Load Balancing, Cloudflare's customers can now route requests between multiple origins, allowing them to serve requests from the closest (and fastest) geographic location.

The Cloudflare Load Balancer automatically sends you notifications when things fail, and when they come back up again, so you can sleep well at night knowing we are keeping your website or API running.

If a DDoS attack can bring down your DNS provider or load balancer, it doesn't matter whether your servers are healthy or not. Our load balancing service runs in Cloudflare's 110+ datacenters, and with experience dealing with some of the largest DDoS attacks, we can withstand traffic volumes that smaller providers, virtual machines or hardware appliances can't. This also allows us to help you avoid business-impacting downtime when major cloud compute providers have issues: when we identify a connectivity reaching your application on AWS, we Continue reading

Cloudflare Traffic Manager: The Details

Cloudflare's investment into building a large global network protects our customers from DDoS attacks, secures them with our Web Application Firewall and Universal SSL, as well as improving performance through our CDN and the many network-level optimizations we're constantly iterating on.

Building on these products, we just introduced Cloudflare Traffic. To explain the benefits, we'll dive into the nitty-gritty details of how the monitoring and load-balancing features of Traffic Manager can be configured, and how we use it within our own website to reduce visitor latency, and improve redundancy across continents. We'll do a similar post on Traffic Control soon.

We're also kicking off the Early Access program for Traffic Manager, with details at the end of this post.

The Details

One of our primary goals when building Traffic Manager was to make it available to everyone: from those with just two servers in a single region, to those with 400 scattered across the globe (and everything in between). We also wanted to solve some of the key limitations of existing products: slow failover times (measured in minutes), and a lack of granular decision making when failing over.

• We can failover within seconds for proxied ("orange clouded") records. Connecting clients Continue reading