Cloudflare Load Balancing

Maximize application performance and availability

Overutilized or geographically distant servers add latency and degrade the user experience. Such mistakes can prove costly, resulting in lost customers, missed revenue, and reputational damage.

With Cloudflare Load Balancing, you can improve application performance and availability by steering traffic away from unhealthy origin servers and dynamically distributing it to the most available and responsive server pools.

Manage from a unified control plane

Manage global and local traffic in a complex infrastructure environment from one place — the Cloudflare Dashboard. Intelligently route your traffic based on geography, latency, and availability.

Increase reliability with fast failover

Route your visitors away from unhealthy origins and failover instantly with zero downtime. As soon as an origin or pool goes down, requests proxied through Cloudflare get instantly re-routed — without waiting for TTLs to expire.

Reduce your total cost of ownership

Gain operational agility and reduce capital expenditure by replacing on-premise load balancing hardware with an enterprise-grade, cloud-based load balancing solution from Cloudflare — all delivered and billed as a service.

Connect to the Cloudflare Global Network

Cloudflare Load Balancing runs at each of our data centers across 200 cities worldwide and is powered by our DDoS-resilient DNS — the fastest Authoritative DNS in the world. Our global Anycast network is 15x bigger than the largest DDoS attack ever recorded and ensures that traffic continues to get routed even under stress. We support load balancing for both proxied and non- proxied traffic.

"The combination of Load Balancing’s geolocation steering and Cloudflare’s caching makes sure customers are getting the fastest load times possible."

Nigel Hepworth

Managing Director

The Cloudflare advantage

Active Health Monitoring

Actively monitor the health of your pools to detect outages and eliminate potential downtime. Classification of a pool as unhealthy can be based on an extensive set of user-configurable parameters. Health checks can be conducted as often as every 10 seconds through periodic HTTP/HTTPS requests, with reports delivered via email notifications or REST API.

Detailed Traffic Analytics

Get a granular view of your traffic — identify which origins and pools are being selected for your traffic and why, so you can gather insights to optimize your infrastructure. See visualizations of your traffic demands on load balancers, pools, and origins over variable time ranges.

Real-Time Latency Maps

Create real-time maps to analyze the responsiveness of all your origins around the world, no matter where they are hosted — on-prem, in the cloud, or in a hybrid environment. Identify the regions where requests are underperforming, so you can timely investigate the cause of failure.

Multi-Cloud Support

Cloudflare Load Balancing fits seamlessly into a multi-cloud environment, enabling you to avoid costly vendor lock-ins. Using a vendor-agnostic load balancer increases the fault tolerance of your architecture by safeguarding your applications from disruptions caused by any single provider. Upon detecting an outage or connectivity issues with any cloud provider, Cloudflare Load Balancing automatically routes your traffic to healthy servers.

Session Affinity

Maintain session affinity by binding a user's session to a specific origin, ensuring that all requests during the session are sent to the same origin. This helps maintain critical session information and enables a seamless, uninterrupted user experience.

Easy Configuration

We make configuring and managing load balancing simple. You can set up a fully-functioning load balancing infrastructure within minutes using the Cloudflare Dashboard or REST API. No additional hardware or software required. You also get the flexibility of adding or removing origins to load balancers as your traffic scales.

Cloudflare's Load Balancing Analytics gives our team a granular lens into where our traffic is going, across multiple origin servers and geographic locations. This allows us to look at load and latency trends over time, making sure there are no single areas of the system that may act as a bottleneck.

Bobby Samanian

Director, System Operations