Read a brief introduction to Cloudflare Load Balancing and visit the documentation site.
What is Cloudflare Load Balancing?
Cloudflare Load Balancing provides DNS-based load balancing and active health checks against origin web servers and pools.
It expands on Cloudflare’s existing Anycast DNS network to provide resilience against distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks by steering away from healthy origin servers.
Cloudflare Load Balancing delivers three key features:
- Load balancing and failover: Deliver traffic evenly across healthy servers, automatically failing over when a server is unhealthy or not responsive.
- Active health checks: Set up health checks to monitor your servers at configurable intervals and look for specific status codes, response text, and/or timeouts. Cloudflare monitors your servers from each of our data centers.
- Geographic control: Direct visitors in Europe to your European data center, US visitors to your North American data center, or dive deeper and configure traffic at a regional level.
Learn more
Visit the following documentation resources in the Cloudflare Developer Portal to learn more about Cloudflare Load Balancing:
- Understand the basics (includes information about load balancers, traffic steering, pools, weighted load balancing, Cloudflare proxy modes, session affinity, and monitors)
- Best practices
- Troubleshooting
- Load Balancing analytics
- Combining Railgun and Load Balancers
To learn about pricing and billing, read the article Billing for Cloudflare Load Balancing.