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Cloudflare Traffic Manager

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Re: Cloudflare Traffic Manager

#11

Post by bks »

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.

Re: Cloudflare Traffic Manager

#12

Post by kijin »

bks wrote: post #11

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 incre…

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.

Re: Cloudflare Traffic Manager

#13

Post by bks »

kijin wrote: post #12
bks wrote: post #11

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 incre…

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.

I am extremely thankful for the robustness of SMTP.

Re: Cloudflare Traffic Manager

#14

Post by kijin »

jgrahamc wrote: post #8
NetStrikeForce wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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 M…

Somewhat off topic, but since CloudFlare keeps mentioning "routing the nearest data center" as one of its benefits...

I have a number of clients near ICN (Seoul) who have been happy with CloudFlare for some time, but now the vast majority of their users are being routed through LAX. Not Tokyo, nor Osaka, nor any of your other locations throughout East Asia, but LAX all the way across the Pacific Ocean! This detour adds about 300ms to every uncached request, and 150ms to every cached request. All the time I spent helping my clients shave a few milliseconds off their response times, now completely obliterated!

When the Pro plan ($20/mo) users contacted CloudFlare to find out what was going on, they were told to upgrade to the Business plan ($200/mo). Some of them did, but their users were still being routed halfway around the world. When they contacted support again, they were told to consider upgrading to an Enterprise plan. What is this, a cheap webhosting shop that tells people to upgrade whenever they're having a problem?

I don't know what happened around late summer that suddenly made Korean and Japanese locations off limits to all but the highest paying customers (local ISPs demanding more money?) but whatever it is, it has made CloudFlare barely usable where I live.

Re: Cloudflare Traffic Manager

#15

Post by jgrahamc »

kijin wrote: post #14
jgrahamc wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 M…

Somewhat off topic, but since CloudFlare keeps mentioning "routing the nearest data center" as one of its benefits... I have a number of clients near ICN (Seoul) who have been happy with CloudFlare for some time, but now the vast majority of their users are being routed through LAX. Not Tokyo, nor Osaka, nor any of your other locations throughout East Asia, but LAX all the way across the Pacific Ocean! This detour ad…

That experience with support doesn't sound right at all. Please email jgc @ cloudflare so I can follow up with you on this.

Re: Cloudflare Traffic Manager

#16

Post by kijin »

jgrahamc wrote: post #15
kijin wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Somewhat off topic, but since CloudFlare keeps mentioning "routing the nearest data center" as one of its benefits... I have a number of clients near ICN (Seoul) who have been happy with CloudFlare for some time, but now the vast majority of their users are being routed through LAX. Not Tokyo, nor Osaka, nor any of your other locations throughout East Asia, but LAX all the way across the Pacific Ocean! This detour ad…

That experience with support doesn't sound right at all. Please email jgc @ cloudflare so I can follow up with you on this.

Okay, I'll gather some information from people affected by this and get back to you.

Re: Cloudflare Traffic Manager

#17

Post by NetStrikeForce »

jgrahamc wrote: post #8
NetStrikeForce wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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 M…

That's awesome and definitely a different product.

Thank you very much for sharing!

Re: Cloudflare Traffic Manager

#18

Post by NetStrikeForce »

stedaniels wrote: post #10
NetStrikeForce wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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

It was my understanding based on the website's copy that this was also a DNS GLB:

Expanding on Cloudflare’s highly available DNS infrastructure and global Anycast network, the Cloudflare Traffic Manager is a cloud-based load-balancing solution that enhances the performance and availability of your Internet facing infrastructure. Designed for scale, flexibility and robustness, CTM enables your applications to deliver the ultimate end user experience through the highest level of performance and reliability.

It has since been clarified that this product has the ability to re-route traffic based on availability and it does not base its balancing in returning different results for the same DNS query.

P.S.: I'm not saying that the copy "says" this is DNS GLB, I'm just saying it was vague enough for me to assume it was a DNS GLB.

Re: Cloudflare Traffic Manager

#19

Post by zzzcpan »

kijin wrote: post #12
bks wrote: post #11

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 incre…

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.

> 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.

Re: Cloudflare Traffic Manager

#20

Post by pencoyd »

NetStrikeForce wrote: post #18
stedaniels wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

It was my understanding based on the website's copy that this was also a DNS GLB: Expanding on Cloudflare’s highly available DNS infrastructure and global Anycast network, the Cloudflare Traffic Manager is a cloud-based load-balancing solution that enhances the performance and availability of your Internet facing infrastructure. Designed for scale, flexibility and robustness, CTM enables your applications to deliver…

I hope you'll apply for Early Access and put our new service through its paces.

A colleague just published more details here https://blog.cloudflare.com/cloudflare-traffic-manager-the-d...

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