Load Balancing Gets Regional Health: Avoid Only the Pools a Region Can't Reach
Hi everyone, Shii-chan here! Today's news is about a new Cloudflare Load Balancing feature, and it makes the load balancer a little smarter.
Cloudflare Changelog
developers.cloudflare.com
What was announced?
In the Cloudflare Changelog, Load Balancing now supports regional health.
Each Cloudflare region can make an independent health decision for a pool. When pool reachability differs by region, traffic can avoid an unreachable pool without removing it from service elsewhere.
The story so far
Until now, pool health was treated as a single, global decision. That means a failure on one specific network path could affect how the whole pool was handled.
(The source doesn't describe the old behavior in detail. What it does say is that pools without health_sources keep their existing health behavior.)
What changes
- When reachability differs by region, only the affected regions steer away from the pool
- Other regions keep using the same pool, since it isn't removed from service
- It's especially useful for multi-region deployments and failures that affect specific network paths
That means fewer cases where a pool that is only unreachable from some places becomes unusable for everyone.
Dive Deep
You configure it with the health_sources field on a pool.
{
"health_sources": ["regional", "global"]
}
["regional", "global"]prefers regional health- If no regional decision is available, global health is used
- Pools without
health_sourceskeep their existing health behavior
Existing pools don't change unless you opt in, so you can try it on the pools that need it. The Regional health page in the docs has the full details.
Wrap-up
- Load Balancing supports independent health decisions per region
- Set
health_sourcesto["regional", "global"]to enable it - Pools without the field behave as before
- Failures on specific paths no longer have to affect other regions
If you run load balancing across multiple regions, this one is for you!
