Load Balancer dynamic steering
I am using the Cloudflare Load Balancer service, and my goal is to dynamically direct traffic through Cloudflare Load Balancer to route requests to my endpoints in the fastest possible way. My endpoints are located in three regions: Asia, Europe, and North America. After setting up the service, I started testing by setting up a server in South America and sending requests both through Cloudflare Load Balancer and directly to my three endpoints. However, I found that the speed of requests through the Load Balancer is not fast and even slower than sending directly to my all endpoints. How should I modify the configuration to achieve my goal? Please help!
8 Replies
Can anyone help me
As mentioned above, my test client is in South America. My endpoints are located in three regions: Asia, Europe, and North America. When using Dynamic steering, the client is sent to the load balancer and directly to the three endpoints. I found that the response time of load balancing is slower than that of North America and Europe, and faster than that of Asia. The order of my endpoint pool is also Europe, North America, and Asia. I suspect that Dynamic steering does not take effect, causing the load balancing to endpoints in Europe. How should I optimize it? , to make it take effect, that is, load it to the North American endpoint with the fastest response
Is it useful to activate multiple Health Check Regions and Health Checks Analytics? Do dynamic steering and health rely on Health Checks Analytics? And whether it is related to Health Check Regions
Yes, Dynamic steering uses Health Check data: https://developers.cloudflare.com/load-balancing/understand-basics/traffic-steering/steering-policies/dynamic-steering/
If there is no current RTT data for your pool in a region or colocation center, Cloudflare directs traffic to the pools in failover order.
Cloudflare Docs
Dynamic | Cloudflare Load Balancing docs
Dynamic steering uses health monitor data to identify the fastest pool for a given Cloudflare Region or data center.
For non-health check based options, you could give all of your pools geo coordinates and then use Proximity steering: https://developers.cloudflare.com/load-balancing/understand-basics/traffic-steering/steering-policies/proximity-steering/, or geo-steering
Thanks for your reply, what would be the best strategy for accessing our load balancing from all over the world as per the scenario stated above? Is it to enable Traffic/Health Check and then configure multiple Health Check Regions for each Endpoints? We would like to have stable and fast access.
Stable is an interesting word to throw in there. Dynamic can be cool and easy to setup, just use All Regions. It's not very stable though as routing and such can change resulting in locations picking different pools. If you wanted stable and you only have a few, you could just do proximity or geo-steering depending on how specific you want to get. Eitherway once you set it up you can peak at Load Balancing Analytics and see if it's being distributed in the way you want. Adding some sort of backend header to indictate location picked can also be super helpful
Okay, what I mean by stable is being able to load to a relatively fast endpoint every time. I will try activating Load Balancing Analytics and All Regions later. Thanks🌹
@Chaika Hello, where can I view Health Checks Analytics? I have activated pro, but I don’t see Health Checks Analytics under the Traffic menu.
They're under Load Balancing Analytics
well, i see Health Checks Analytics now
Why doesn't dynamic steering choose the fastest endpoint? I created three pools for endpoints in three physical regions, chose the dynamic steering policy, and also turned on business plan to configure all regions for all endpoint health checks, but through experimentation, I found that the load balancing is still choosing the default order of the pools instead of choosing the best based on the regional latency endpoint. This is seriously affecting the service I provide to the public, please respond immediately if you receive this, thank you!
Can anyone help me😆