As a SaaS provider I don’t have DNS control over all my customer domains, but with Cloudflare for SaaS I have the great benefit of using Cloudflare for all of them because I just need to setup the fallback origin one time on their DNS. But I have a few origins and mainly for maintenance purpose, I may have the need to move customers between those origins selectively.
I cannot move customers between origins without action on customer’s DNS (need to change the fallback dns record), and this is a lack of autonomy in managing my infrastructure.
A great improvement on Cloudflare for Saas would be the possibility to purchase multiple fallback origins, I know this is available for enterprise users but for solutions where enterprise cost is not affordable, I would love to pay such feature maybe also as an add on to a business plan.
Yes I’m aware that this feature is available on Enterprise plan, my product improvement request was in fact related to this.
I try to explain my thoughts (and needs): Cloudflare allows the SaaS solution from the free plan, without any difference in the Pro and Business plan. As a SaaS provider this is a great feature, but many of us have more than one fallback origin for various purposes. Having multiple origins doesn’t mean that we automatically have possibilities to purchase an Enterprise plan, but we would like to elevate from the Free plan in order to benefit from other Cloudflare features.
Now, to accomplish that I need to purchase a Pro/Business plan for each fallback origin I may have (and in case of business plan the cost will be probably close to an Enterprise).Anyway having a different domain for each origin, doesn’t allow me to have full control over maintenance of the architecture because if I need to change the fallback origin of a domain, I need to act on the customer’s DNS (and this is not a solution when there’re hundreds of domains hosted in the customer own NS).
So, what I’m asking is the possibility to have a “Professional/Business” solution for SaaS providers, allowing them to have multiple origins in a step before the Enterprise plan that is not affordable by everyone. At least in my case, I will buy for sure products and “add on” if I can have just one business plan (now I can’t buy because I should buy for N Free/Pro/Business plans and I cannot afford).
I’m also aware that there’s possibility to have multiple fallback origins using workers, but this drives to unpredictable costs and performances. Having native multiple fallback origins would be absolutely a game changer for small/medium SaaS providers.
I read another post that mentioned using a Worker as a fallback origin and then in the Worker routing the request appropriately. Not sure if there would be cert setup or renewal issues with this, but surely if this is a feasible workaround it would make more sense to just enable this feature for plans below Enterprise? I would imagine the Worker uses more resources to accomplish this than doing it properly would. A Worker doing this would easily run in the free tier too.
Yes I’ve also read that alternative and I tested, but as you stated this is a workaround that will use more resources and will run in unpredictable costs.
Another fact is that the worker will act as a proxy if compared to the normal SaaS solution (that is more similar to a normal Cloudflare proxied DNS record), this behaviour will cause significant changes in the websites.
