Cloudflare Traffic Manager

https://www.cloudflare.com/traffic-manager/

by IcyApril • 10 years ago

67 27 10 years ago

cloudflare.com

daviddumenil• 10 years ago

This has been offered by their competitor Incapsula for some time under the name 'Global Server Load Balancing'

https://www.incapsula.com/load-balancing-failover.html

NetStrikeForce3• 10 years ago

And AWS Route 53: https://aws.amazon.com/route53/ Or Microsoft Traffic Manager: https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/services/traffic-manager/

And possibly many, many other providers.

It would be interesting to know if there's some innovation here.

jgrahamc4• 10 years ago

Because Cloudflare uses Anycast there is no change in the public IP address for a request that hits us. It will be routed to the nearest data center (of which we now have 100 cities covered globally). The Traffic Manager product controls how that traffic is the routed to the origin server (if the request could not be served from cache).

As the active monitoring is performed from each location separately the Traffic Manager applies its policies in each location and can automatically route around connectivity problems in the Internet as well as origin server problems. All without changing public DNS.

This allows us to do very fast failover and route changes because this is independent of the propagation time for DNS on the public Internet. Solutions based on changing DNS records are suboptimal.

stedaniels• 10 years ago

Neither of those services are http(s) load balancers and are merely (specialised) DNS managers.

ddorian432• 10 years ago

Since cloudflare staff is always in this forum:

This means like you can add several server ips and you get a load balancer? And how many servers? And round-robin or something more smart? In what plans will this be available and if at extra cost ?

Is there any alternative to this ? This may be the perfect thing for dedicated providers that don't offer a loadbalancer.

jgrahamc4• 10 years ago

This allows you to create groups of servers (multiple servers per group) and do load balancing across servers inside a group, failover between servers, failover between groups (based on some threshold number of servers inside a group having failed), geo-steering so that visitors from different parts of the world hit different groups.

Today's announcement is currently only weighted round-robin within a group, but additional algorithms will be supported.

ddorian432• 10 years ago

What about the cost ? Your competitor on another comment has a "contact us" price.

Toxton• 10 years ago

I can't knock them for constantly adding features.

I know people don't like the psuedo-centralization and the hand wavy action that their waf does...

yet they keep creating a strong value proposition that makes it so easy for small-medium projects to get so many services for free (DNS, SSL, CDN) or relatively cheap compared to competition (DDOS Mitigation).

I don't know of any other single service that does this at their price points, is there one? (maybe aws with their offerings of waf, cloudfront, route 53 etc).

bks2• 10 years ago

I am a customer of a competitive product, where we have a cluster of servers on port 25 that need load balancing. Pretty simple setup - if port 25 goes down for more than 2 minutes remove from DNS until it comes back online.

It's been incredibly stable and robust and a real life saver if you have gear in multiple geographic data centers that are not all with one provider. The competitors cost for the service is incredibly cheap hen you consider what it does - but the BIG GOTCHA is you need to use their DNS in order to use the load balancer.

And we move about 350 queries per second so the bill is pretty high (for our sized company). The place that I should be able to get an immediate impact and huge savings is that Cloudflare does DNS for "free".

I should be able to pay a modest but competitive rate for their traffic manager, but with no QPS it will be huge.

I just spoke to sales in the UK and they don’t actually have a good definition of the product yet. No pricing and really did not have their questions to ask prospects yet.

That being said we are already using them for pseudo-Traffic Management services we have a script tied to Pingdom.com that updates DNS from the port monitoring and adds and removes records in just a few seconds.

kijin4• 10 years ago

It's okay for port 25 to go down for 2 minutes because standards-compliant senders will retry when your server is back up.

It's not okay for a widely used web service to go down for 2 minutes until you can update your DNS. Failover needs to happen within a few seconds, and most importantly, while the client is still connected to the load balancer. You can't do this using DNS with short TTL values.

bks2• 10 years ago

I am extremely thankful for the robustness of SMTP.

zzzcpan• 10 years ago

Failover needs to happen within a few seconds, and most importantly, while the client is still connected to the load balancer. You can't do this using DNS with short TTL values.

No it doesn't and it's good enough. Humans are not stupid, they will try again, web browsers will try other IPs too. For custom clients it's not even a question, as they can implement transparent failover in the client itself. Essentially this is all about web browsers.

The big problem with anycast routing is that you still have to rely on a single AS/company and have a huge SPOF, that will fail from time to time. A few hours of downtime every other year is as good as you can get, less than that would be pretty much impossible for such architecture. So, if you need anything better, you would have no choice but implement a DNS failover.

gagabity2• 10 years ago

It is shocking how many sites now use CloudFlare, I have recently switched ISPs and aparently my new ISP is SPAMMER and BOT heaven so almost every site I go to asks me to complete the Im Not A Robot Cloudflare reCapture. Really makes the experience suck.

ohstopitu• 10 years ago

what else would you use instead of CloudFlare?

gagabity2• 10 years ago

If I was operating a site? I dont think there is anything comparable at the free cost. But what you can do is turn the sensitivity if the captcha challenge down to 'Essentially Off' as detailed here https://support.cloudflare.com/hc/en-us/articles/200170096-H... the default setting seems to be way too quick to throw up a captcha.

user5994461• 10 years ago

The main competitor is Akamai. Have fun with the sales team.

Cloudflare Traffic Manager

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