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) is a DNS extension that enables a recursive DNS resolver to include the subnet of the user’s IP.
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. |