Traffic steering policies
Traffic steering policies decide how a load balancer routes traffic to attached and healthy pools.
- Standard: Standard steering policies include Off - Failover and Random.
- Geo: Geo steering directs traffic to pools tied to specific countries, regions, or — for Enterprise customers only — data centers.
- Dynamic: Dynamic steering uses health monitor data to identify the fastest pool for a given Cloudflare Region or data center.
- Proximity: Proximity steering routes visitors or internal services to the closest physical data center.
- Least Outstanding Requests: Least Outstanding Requests steering allows you to route traffic to pools that currently have the fewest number of outstanding requests.
EDNS Client Subnet (ECS) support
EDNS Client Subnet (ECS) support provides customers with more control over location-based steering during gray-clouded DNS resolutions and can be used for proximity or geo (country) steering.
Customers can configure their load balancer using the location_strategy parameter, which includes the properties prefer_ecs and mode.
prefer_ecs determines whether the ECS GeoIP should be preferred as the authoritative location.
| Type | Description |
|---|---|
"always" | Always prefers ECS. |
"never" | Never prefers ECS. |
"proximity" | Prefers ECS only when steering_policy="proximity". |
"geo" | Prefers ECS only when steering_policy="geo" and only supports country-level steering. |
mode determines the authoritative location when ECS is not preferred, does not exist in the request, or its GeoIP lookup is unsuccessful.
| Type | Description |
|---|---|
"pop" | Uses the Cloudflare PoP location. |
"resolver_ip" | Uses the DNS resolver GeoIP location. If the GeoIP lookup is unsuccessful, it uses the Cloudflare PoP location. |