Transcript for "Cloudflare Load Balancing and Traffic Management Demo":
Cloudflare's connectivity cloud puts you back in control, making your world infinitely more productive and secure. Flow, Erentham, and welcome to today's session on load balancing and traffic management with Cloudflare. My name is Nemanja Wucicherich, and I will be guiding you to this session. Today, we will explore how Cloudflare helps accelerate, optimize, and secure your Internet traffic and Internet applications through intelligent traffic routing. So before we dive in into technical details, a few quick notes. We will start with a short presentation to set up the stage, and then we will jump into live demo to show you how Cloudflare balancing works in real world scenarios. So let's get started and see how Cloudflare can help your applications perform better globally and more efficiently than traditional hardware based setups. Here is our agenda and, what we will cover today. So we will talk about, the impact of poor traffic distribution on performance and how it leads, to user dissatisfaction. And after that, they will talk about why Cloudflare is uniquely positioned and how we can help to to deliver faster, smarter, and reliable solutions. After that, we will perform a live demo where I will show you configuration side, our dashboard setup, and I will show you how simple and flexible it is. Let's begin by examining the challenges that many businesses face today with performance and why effective management is, let's say, crucial for delivering best user experience. Today, Internet users, they are highly, highly sensitive to performance. A delay of even milliseconds can have serious consequences on user engagement, plus on revenue and your brand perception. So according to Forbes, it only takes fifty milliseconds for a user to form, an opinion about your website, and that's faster than a blink of an eye just for a comparison. And according to research, eighty eight percent of the users say they are unlikely to return to a site after a bad experience. In traditional hardware load balancing, managing traffic across regions can add significant latency and complexity as well. And with Cloudflare and with our Anycast global network, we route traffic to the nearest port or DC point of presence, ensuring fast, very fast response time, and we managed to reduce the latency and that user experience. So as your guidance, grows and become more global, the challenges increase. Users are connecting from various geographic, places, and you need an infrastructure that is available, fast, and resilient no matter where they are in the world. So that's where we jump in with the global presence of, more than 330 PCs around the world. And the carrying them and our Enercast network, we ensure that we can minimize the latency by routing topics to the closest server or point of presence, closest one to the user, reducing the need for costly traditional hardware setup that can scale efficiently or provide the same level of performance optimization. So traditional hardware solutions often require complex and expensive configurations, including load balancers, firewalls, and traffic steering devices that increase both cost and your initiative overhead. So Cloudflare provides that unified cloud native solution, drastic drastically improving and simplifying management and and scalability. So why Cloudflare? The answer is simple. We are here, with a simple mission to help build a better Internet, and our platform is built around three core pillars, performance, security, and reliability. Performance is all about reducing latency and improving load times globally. Traditional driver solutions struggle with this because they rely on local infrastructure, and that may not be strategically placed across the globe while our or cloud's Anycast network ensures that users get the fastest response regardless of their location. So let's take a look at some of the key Cloudflare statistics that highlight our global presence and capabilities. We have, more than 330 DCs around the world, and you don't need to build and maintain these yourselves, unlike traditional hardware flow balancers that require physical presence in each region. We have, or we are connected to more than 12,000 networks, ensuring high availability, lower latency, and better performance across all continents. Our Anycast network allows us to serve users from the nearest and most optimal location for minimal latency and maximum performance without securing any costly hardware deployments. So our platform offers a single control plane for all your load balancing needs. This eliminates the complexity of managing the multiple pieces of hardware based infrastructure, allowing you to deploy policies, configure routing, and ensure performance across public, private, and hybrid environments as well. All all of that through our simple and intuitive interface. We have two different, types of load balancers that you can work with. It depends on your needs. So we provide two primary types of load balancing, global load balancing, which distributes traffic across public origins hosted in different regions or cloud providers. And this ensures that users are always routed to the nearest and most available server, improving performance and resilience. And it allows you to take advantage of our global network, by routing traffic away from paired servers or regions, for example. And, private load balancing is used for applications that are hosted in internal environments, like on prem or private clouds. And we offer transfer tunnel for secure and efficient traffic routing so you can continue to use the power of our videos video as protection and load balancing even for private services without exposing them to the Internet. In both cases, Cloudflare's load balancing system benefits from built in DDoS protection, automatic failover, and performance optimization. Traditional hardware approaches don't offer this level of automatic resilience, requiring manual intervention for configuration changes while the router ensures that if one of servers or agents goes down, traffic is really seamlessly rerouted to the next health instance without interrupting your service. So let's now, move on to the demo. For the demo, we will use our Frame Memory Studio environment, which has servers located in four different regions, North Virginia, US, Milan, Italy, Johannesburg, Africa, and Mumbai, India. Frame Memory Studio is a global online photography agency that is capturing artistic pictures and sharing them to millions of the users worldwide. Let's now jump to our demo environment. For our demo environment, as I mentioned, we will use framememories.net zone. And in order to onboard the zone cluster, you can do it quickly, in, in, five minutes. And once you're onboarding onboard your zone there, you will be able to access all these cool features that you can see on the left side. Here, under, analytics and logs, for example, you can see everything regarding your HTTP traffic, what's happening, number of total requests, requests volume by country. So from where is the traffic coming. First, paths, you can see data transfer, periods, API requests. And based on that, you can, optimize your traffic, and you can, better implement your, for example, load balancing solution. So let's go to to the, load balancing load balancing part. So if you go under traffic tab on the left and if you click onto the load balancing part, we will see that we have two different types of load balancers where they preconfigured for this particular demo. In case you need to configure your own, you can simply do it by clicking here on create load balancer. However, for this particular, instance, they already created one global and one private, and I will now show you how easy it was to configure them. So in order to see what's configured there, you can go here. And, here, you can see everything that has been configured. So for step one, we need to configure cost name. This is where you will basically set your domain name for load balancer. Let's say you're configuring, this global.framememories.net, domain where users will access your platform. With the traditional hardware setups, configuring this manually can take hours or even days, especially with complex routing rules. Next thing, it would be to configure pools. These are basically the back end servers or services that will handle the traffic, and we can create an origin pool for each geographic region. For example, one pool might be based in North Virginia and another one in Milan with Cloudflare. This can be set up in a few clicks compared to manual configuration needed for physical load balancing hardware. After this, we can configure monitors, and monitors basically check the health of your origins. You can set up rules to, check things like HTTP status, code, or timeouts. So for example, we can see that here we have get requests that are checking. And while we are getting 200 okay message, we will assume that these particular calls are healthy. In case we they're not healthy, we would see it here. And after that, we will be the traffic will automatically be rerouted to the second best server, and we would be able to troubleshoot based on the error message. After that, we can configure with the click traffic steering, which, is basically where you decide how your traffic should be routed. You can use GRouting to send traffic to from specific agents, to their closest DCs. Or, for example, you can use latency based routing to ensure you users always get fastest response times. After traffic steering, you need to configure custom rules. And, let's say that you have a special requirement, like directing mobile traffic to lightweight version of your app or routing branch users to a specific European origin. With Cloudflare's load balancing, you can create these rules to match your business needs. After creating any custom rules, we can review everything that has been configured. And once we check everything, we simply go and save. And after that, if everything is okay, we will see that our load balancing is active. And in case for all of our pools and servers are healthy, we will see that, we will see that here under the health health section. So, let's now talk about private private load balancing. Private load balancing is for the situations where some of your applications are hosted internally, whether on prem or in private clouds. And for these types of environments, Cloudflare provides private load balancing with Cloudflare tunnel. Cloudflare tunnel basically secure creates, secure outbound only connection between your private infrastructure and Cloudflare. And this way, you don't need to expose your internal systems or IPs directly to the Internet. Just like the public origins, you can distribute traffic across multiple private origins and use health checks to ensure only healthy systems serve your traffic end users. With traditional hardware solutions, this kind of secure role balancing would be much more complex and expensive to implement. And the amazing thing is that, configuration wise, it is, very similar to what we had with the global load balancer. Here, for example, you can see that we have two different private pools. And, if you click here on edit, under pools, you will see these two pools. And let's see their configuration. Inside of their configuration, we can see that their endpoint address is basically private IP, and we can see that we also have virtual network configured, which is basically for avoiding overlapping. So it is very easy to configure that. And now once we know that, we can go to our paymemories,uh,.net site and see if we are targeting the correct region. So let me share that. So let's refresh the site, and we can see that our, site targeted, frame memories that is in Europe. So the server from the Europe, since I'm located currently in Lisbon, our server from Europe basically served our site. And now let's see what is happening with our, private site that is hosted on, under private IP. Let's see if we can access that one. So this is the one. And in case we refresh, we can see, that this site is that this simple site, in this case, is accessible and that we can access it. So let's go back to our dashboard. Now when we saw how easy it is to configure, I want to show you something additionally, which is basically here on the right side where you can see this traffic sequence, which is basically what happens with your HTTP request once it hits our POP or car cluster network. Basically, this all these steps here on the right happen. All these rules, IP access rules, DDoS protection, cash rules, bots, rate limiting, workers, All of this happens before load balancer. And that is basically where our biggest strength is because we have this tremendous and strong network that is performing all these checks and even additionally, is helping you even before load balancing and going to your origin server. And now you might have one very valid question. That is what is happening with speed in this case? Because here you can see that the sequence is pretty long and that many things are happening there. So that that is great question. Actually, we have, something that is called Argo Smart Routing. And the amazing thing with Cloudflare is that although all these things and, are happening inside of the sequence, once once your request hits our network, our, our clients basically can benefit from, up to 30% of the, better response times. So we have something that is called Argo Smart Routing, which is, like, something for dynamic content that can be cached. We use it to improve performance and Argo routes traffic over the fastest and most reliable network paths based on real time latency measurements inside of our network. So this is something traditional hardware setups cannot provide without costly additional infrastructure. And with one toggle that you can see here, you can reduce your latency, as I said, up to 30% or even more for uncached assets like API calls, images, or even personalized content. So here, we can see, how easy it is to configure simply by clicking this button here. So let's now doing that, go back to our presentation. So to recap, here is how Cloudflare load balancing can benefit your business. You can basically get improved agility, and, you can improve global performance and reduce latency by routing users to the nearest available DC. You can improve agility by creating rules at one place and deploying them across your infrastructure at one click, of a button. You can increase availability with health checks, failover, and automatic traffic rerouting. You can secure your internal services with private load balancing and cluster tunnel, and you can optimize real time content delivery using Argo smart routing. So getting started is easy. You can create a free account at -.Cloudflare.com or reach out to us for personalized onboarding sessions. We come to the end of our session. So thank you very much for joining today's session, and we look forward to helping you enhance the performance and security of all your services with Cloudflare. Have a good day, and goodbye.