Smart Tiered Cache now caches your cloud origins smarter!

Hi everyone, it's me, Shii-chan! Today I found a story about caching getting a little smarter.

Cloudflare Changelog developers.cloudflare.com

What was announced?

Over on the Cloudflare Changelog, Smart Tiered Cache got optimized for origins hosted on public cloud providers. When you set a cloud region hint for your origin, Cloudflare picks the best upper-tier data center for that cloud region and funnels all cache MISSes through a single location close to your origin.

The story so far

Until now, Smart Tiered Cache could not reliably pick an optimal upper tier for origins sitting behind the anycast or regional unicast networks that cloud providers commonly use. Origins on AWS, GCP, Azure, and Oracle Cloud would fall back to a multi-upper-tier topology, which meant lower cache HIT rates and more requests reaching your origin.

What changes

By adding a cloud region hint, you get higher cache HIT rates and less load on your origin. That's great news if you host your origin on a public cloud. And it works on the Free, Pro, Business, and Enterprise plans at no extra cost.

Dive Deep

The setup is short. Set a cloud region hint like aws/us-east-1 or gcp/europe-west1 on your origin IP or hostname. Smart Tiered Cache combines that hint with real-time latency data to select a primary upper tier close to your cloud region, plus a fallback in a different location for resilience.

Supported providers are AWS, GCP, Azure, and Oracle Cloud. You can configure it from Caching > Tiered Cache > Origin Configuration in the dashboard, or use the API and Terraform. To get started, enable Smart Tiered Cache and set your cloud region hint in the Tiered Cache settings.

Wrap-up

• A cloud region hint boosts cache HIT rates even for public cloud origins
• Supported on AWS, GCP, Azure, and Oracle Cloud
• Free on all plans, configurable via dashboard, API, and Terraform
• Perfect for engineers who host origins on a cloud and care about hit rates and origin load!