Useful terms
Review terminology for Cloudflare Tunnels.
A tunnel is a secure, outbound-only pathway you can establish between your origin and Cloudflare's global network. Each tunnel you create will be assigned a name and a UUID.
A tunnel UUID is an alphanumeric, unique ID assigned to a tunnel. The tunnel UUID can be used whenever you need to reference a specific tunnel.
A tunnel name is a unique, user-friendly identifier that you choose for a tunnel. Since a tunnel can proxy traffic to multiple services, tunnel names do not need to be hostnames. For example, you can assign your tunnel a name that represents your application/network, a particular server, or the cloud environment where it runs.
The connector, referred to as cloudflared, establishes connectivity from your origin server to the Cloudflare global network. Our connector offers high availability by creating four long-lived connections to two distinct data centers within Cloudflare's global network. This built-in redundancy means that if an individual connection, server, or data center goes down, your origin remains available.
You can create and configure a tunnel once and run that tunnel through multiple, unique instances of the connector, cloudflared. These instances are known as replicas. DNS records and Cloudflare Load Balancers will still point to the tunnel and its DNS Record (UUID.cfargotunnel.com), while that tunnel sends traffic to the multiple instances of cloudflared that run through it. Today, there is no guarantee about which replica will be chosen. Replicas are often deployed to provide tunnels with high availability in the event a given host running cloudflared is interrupted or taken offline.
A remotely-managed tunnel is a tunnel that was created in Zero Trust ↗ under Networks > Tunnels. Tunnel configuration is stored in Cloudflare, which allows you to manage the tunnel from the dashboard or using the API.
A locally-managed tunnel is a tunnel that was created by running cloudflared tunnel create <NAME> on the command line. Tunnel configuration is stored in your local cloudflared directory. For terminology specific to locally-managed tunnels, refer to the Locally-managed tunnel glossary.
Quick tunnels, when run, will generate a URL that consists of a random subdomain of the website trycloudflare.com, and point traffic to localhost on port 8080. If you have a web service running at that address, users who visit the generated subdomain will be able to visit your web service through Cloudflare's network. Refer to TryCloudflare for more information on how to run quick tunnels.
A virtual network is a software abstraction that allows you to logically segregate resources on your private network. Virtual networks are especially useful for exposing resources which have overlapping IP routes. To connect to a resource, end users would select a virtual network in their WARP client settings before entering the destination IP.
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