Traffic Steering and Policies

Magic Transit uses intelligent traffic steering to optimize routing decisions and ensure high availability.

Overview

Traffic steering controls how traffic flows from Cloudflare’s edge to origin infrastructure. Policies can be based on geographic proximity, health checks, custom priorities, and business requirements.

Steering Methods

Geographic Steering

Proximity-Based Routing:

  • Traffic routes to nearest healthy origin

  • Based on geographic distance

  • Reduces latency for end users

Use Cases:

  • Multi-region deployments

  • Disaster recovery sites

  • Edge computing architectures

Configuration:

  • Define origin locations in Cloudflare

  • Set geographic priorities

  • Enable automatic failover

Health-Based Steering

Dynamic Routing:

  • Traffic only sent to healthy origins

  • Automatic removal of failed endpoints

  • Instant failover to backup origins

Health Check Integration:

  • Monitors origin availability

  • Tests application responsiveness

  • Validates service functionality

Failover Behavior:

  • Immediate traffic shift on failure

  • No manual intervention required

  • Automatic recovery when health restored

Priority-Based Steering

Weighted Distribution:

  • Assign priority values to origins

  • Higher priority receives more traffic

  • Enables gradual migration or canary deployments

Traffic Splitting:

  • Percentage-based distribution

  • A/B testing capabilities

  • Blue-green deployment support

Custom Policies

Business Rules:

  • Route by client location

  • Route by service type

  • Route by time of day

  • Route by load or capacity

Advanced Logic:

  • Combine multiple steering methods

  • Nested policies for complex scenarios

  • Override rules for maintenance

Current Configuration

Active Steering Policies

Primary Policy:

  • Method: Health-based with geographic preference

  • Primary Origin: pfSense at 198.51.100.1 (example)

  • Backup Origins: None currently configured

  • Failover: Automatic on health check failure

Tunnel Steering:

  • IPv4 Tunnel: Active primary path

  • IPv6 Tunnel: Active secondary path

  • Load Balancing: Not currently enabled

  • Failover: Automatic between tunnels

Origin Configuration

Site 1 (Primary):

  • Endpoint: 198.51.100.1 (pfSense WAN example)

  • Tunnels: GRE IPv4 + IPv6

  • Health Status: Online

  • Weight: 100 (primary)

Load Balancing

Traffic Distribution

Load balancing distributes traffic across multiple origins:

Methods:

  • Round Robin: Equal distribution

  • Least Connections: Send to least busy

  • Geographic: Route to nearest origin

  • Hash: Consistent routing for sessions

Session Persistence:

  • Source IP-based affinity

  • Cookie-based persistence

  • Custom session identifiers

Current Setup:

Single origin configuration - load balancing not currently active.

Failover Configuration

Automatic Failover

Trigger Conditions:

  • Origin health check failure

  • Tunnel connectivity loss

  • High latency threshold exceeded

  • Manual administrator override

Failover Actions:

  1. Mark origin as unhealthy

  2. Stop routing new traffic

  3. Shift traffic to backup origin

  4. Send administrator alerts

  5. Log failover event

Recovery:

  • Automatic when health restored

  • Configurable recovery delay

  • Gradual traffic reintroduction

  • Validation before full restoration

Manual Failover

Use Cases:

  • Planned maintenance

  • Security incidents

  • Performance optimization

  • Testing and validation

Process:

  1. Access Cloudflare dashboard

  2. Adjust traffic steering policy

  3. Verify traffic shift completion

  4. Monitor origin performance

  5. Document change in runbook

Performance Optimization

Latency Reduction

Strategies:

  • Route to geographically nearest edge

  • Optimize tunnel paths

  • Minimize hop count

  • Use direct peering (if available)

Monitoring:

  • Track latency by region

  • Identify high-latency paths

  • Adjust policies to optimize

Capacity Management

Traffic Shaping:

  • Rate limiting per origin

  • Connection limits

  • Bandwidth allocation

  • QoS policies

Scaling:

  • Add origins to increase capacity

  • Distribute traffic based on load

  • Auto-scale during traffic spikes

DDoS Mitigation

Attack Traffic Handling

At the Edge:

  • Attack traffic absorbed at Cloudflare

  • Only clean traffic forwarded via tunnels

  • Origin infrastructure protected

Mitigation Techniques:

  • Volumetric attack filtering

  • Protocol validation

  • Rate limiting

  • Challenge pages for suspicious traffic

During Attack:

  • Traffic steering remains stable

  • No manual intervention required

  • Origins continue normal operation

  • Attacks invisible to origin

Post-Attack Analysis

Reporting:

  • Attack characteristics and volume

  • Mitigation effectiveness

  • Origin impact (should be zero)

  • Recommendations for improvement

Monitoring and Analytics

Traffic Metrics

Real-Time Monitoring:

  • Requests per second

  • Bandwidth utilization

  • Error rates

  • Response times

Historical Analysis:

  • Traffic trends over time

  • Peak usage periods

  • Growth projections

  • Capacity planning

Steering Analytics

Policy Performance:

  • Traffic distribution by policy

  • Failover frequency and duration

  • Health check success rates

  • Geographic routing effectiveness

Optimization Insights:

  • Identify bottlenecks

  • Improve routing decisions

  • Optimize origin placement

  • Reduce costs

Best Practices

Policy Design

Recommendations:

  • Keep policies simple and maintainable

  • Document policy logic and reasoning

  • Test policies before production deployment

  • Review and update regularly

Avoid:

  • Overly complex nested policies

  • Conflicting steering rules

  • Untested failover configurations

  • Insufficient health check coverage

Maintenance

Regular Tasks:

  • Review traffic patterns monthly

  • Update policies for changes

  • Test failover procedures quarterly

  • Optimize based on performance data

Change Management:

  • Plan policy changes carefully

  • Test in staging environment

  • Deploy during maintenance windows

  • Monitor closely after changes

Incident Response

Playbooks:

  • Document common scenarios

  • Define escalation procedures

  • Maintain contact information

  • Practice incident response

Post-Incident:

  • Conduct root cause analysis

  • Update policies if needed

  • Improve monitoring and alerting

  • Document lessons learned

Advanced Features

Anycast Consistency

Traffic steering ensures consistent Anycast behavior:

  • Same policies across all edges

  • Synchronized configuration updates

  • Uniform attack mitigation

  • Global availability guarantees

Edge Computing Integration

Steering policies can integrate with Cloudflare Workers:

  • Execute logic at the edge

  • Custom routing decisions

  • A/B testing and experiments

  • Personalization and optimization

Multi-Cloud Routing

Route traffic across multiple cloud providers:

  • AWS, Azure, GCP origins

  • Hybrid cloud architectures

  • Cloud migration support

  • Multi-cloud redundancy

Future Enhancements

Planned steering improvements:

  • Additional backup origins

  • Geographic load balancing

  • Advanced traffic analysis

  • Automated policy optimization