Load Balancing Monitor Groups: Multi-Service Health Checks for Resilient Applications

Modern applications are not monoliths. They are complex, distributed systems where availability depends on multiple independent components working in harmony. A web server might be running, but if its connection to the database is down or the authentication service is unresponsive, the application as a whole is unhealthy. Relying on a single health check is like knowing the “check engine” light is not on, but not knowing that one of your tires has a puncture. It’s great your engine is going, but you’re probably not driving far.

As applications grow in complexity, so does the definition of "healthy." We've heard from customers, big and small, that they need to validate multiple services to consider an endpoint ready to receive traffic. For example, they may need to confirm that an underlying API gateway is healthy and that a specific ‘/login’ service is responsive before routing users there. Until now, this required building custom, synthetic services to aggregate these checks, adding operational overhead and another potential point of failure.

Today, we are introducing Monitor Groups for Cloudflare Load Balancing. This feature provides a new way to create sophisticated, multi-service health assessments directly on our platform. With Monitor Groups, you can bundle Continue reading

Eliminating hardware with Load Balancing and Cloudflare One

In 2023, Cloudflare introduced a new load balancing solution supporting Local Traffic Management (LTM). This year, we took it a step further by introducing support for layer 4 load balancing to private networks via Spectrum. Now, organizations can seamlessly balance public HTTP(S), TCP, and UDP traffic to their privately hosted applications. Today, we’re thrilled to unveil our latest enhancement: support for end-to-end private traffic flows as well as WARP authenticated device traffic, eliminating the need for dedicated hardware load balancers! These groundbreaking features are powered by the enhanced integration of Cloudflare load balancing with our Cloudflare One platform, and are available to our enterprise customers. With this upgrade, our customers can now utilize Cloudflare load balancers for both public and private traffic directed at private networks.

Cloudflare Load Balancing today

Before discussing the new features, let's review Cloudflare's existing load balancing support and the challenges customers face.

Cloudflare currently supports four main load balancing traffic flows:

1. Internet-facing load balancers connecting to publicly accessible endpoints at layer 7, supporting HTTP(S).
2. Internet-facing load balancers connecting to publicly accessible endpoints at layer 4 (Spectrum), supporting TCP and UDP services
3. Internet-facing load balancers connecting to private endpoints at layer 7 HTTP(S) via Cloudflare Tunnels.
4. Continue reading