Cloudflare WAN and Magic Transit routing finally comes together!

Hey everyone, it's Shii! Today I found a networking update from Cloudflare. It might look a bit understated at first glance, but it's about an important foundation that supports enterprise networks. Let me walk you through it!

Cloudflare Changelog developers.cloudflare.com

What was announced?

According to the Cloudflare Changelog, "Unified Routing" is now generally available (GA) for both Cloudflare WAN and Magic Transit. Unified Routing is a single routing fabric that improves the integration between Cloudflare One and the standard connectivity onramps supported by Cloudflare WAN.

The original post lists three newly available capabilities:

• Automatic Return Routing
• BGP (Border Gateway Protocol) support
• Custom client subnets

For configuration details, readers are pointed to the Cloudflare WAN traffic steering and Magic Transit traffic steering documentation.

Why it matters

Cloudflare WAN is a networking service that connects a company's sites and cloud environments, while Magic Transit is a network protection service that includes large-scale DDoS mitigation. Both are frequently used together with Cloudflare One, the zero-trust security platform.

Until now, how Cloudflare One connected with the various WAN and Magic Transit onramps may have varied by service. Unified Routing appears to be an effort to bring that together under a single routing fabric, simplifying traffic control across multiple connectivity methods.

What changes

The clearest signal here is that Cloudflare explicitly states it recommends Unified Routing for all new accounts. In other words, for companies newly adopting Cloudflare WAN or Magic Transit going forward, this new routing fabric becomes the standard option.

With Automatic Return Routing, you likely won't need to manually build out detailed return-path routing, since it gets handled automatically. Adding BGP support should also make it easier to exchange routes with existing network equipment. And being able to specify custom client subnets should make it easier to design a flexible setup that matches your internal network configuration.

Wrap-up

• A new routing fabric called "Unified Routing" is now GA for Cloudflare WAN and Magic Transit
• It improves integration with Cloudflare One and unifies handling across supported onramps
• Supports Automatic Return Routing, BGP, and custom client subnets
• Recommended by default for all new accounts

This is an update worth noticing if you're a network admin already running Cloudflare WAN or Magic Transit, or an infrastructure engineer considering adopting them.