If a Load Balancer is set to grey cloud, does Hash based Origin Steering work? In fact, does the Origin Steering setting on the pool have any effect at all?
The documentation doesn’t mention it either way, it says:
- Hash: Cloudflare sends requests to origins based on a combination of origin weights and previous requests from that IP address. Ensures requests from the same IP address will hit the same origin, but actual traffic distribution may differ from origin weights.
In grey cloud, Cloudflare is just doing DNS load balancing, so how can it possibly “Ensure requests from the same IP address will hit the same origin”? The only way I can see would be if it returns different DNS A records to different clients, and from my testing that’s not what happens, it just does normal round-robin with multiple A records returned.
I’m trying to ascertain whether I can use Hash based Origin Steering as a poor-man’s session affinity, since in our situation we can’t use orange cloud, and therefore we can’t use normal session affinity. I suspect it’s not possible and we’ll need to use simple failover rather than active-active with session affinity.