Peering not properly explained on Cloudflare's Network page

Website, Application, Performance
1

Expectation

From: Cloudflare Global Network | Data Center Locations

This means all customer traffic is processed at the data center closest to its source, with no backhauling or performance tradeoffs.

Reality

Paid for a Pro plan, added all our DNS / MX / CNAME / A records, set some Page Rules, played with some Cloudflare Workers only to find out about their Peering process.

Previously, our cached static site can be accessed via Amazon CloudFront in under 10~50ms globally. Currently our site is much slower (at least 100x slower) than before:

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Going to /cdn-cgi/trace shows that the origin is HK, but it has to hop overseas to LAX to get the resources:

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…which is pretty ridiculous considering all the other available data centers available in Asia (Taipei, Tokyo, Seoul, Singapore) — this is nowhere near its closest source and the performance is appalling.

AFAIK, CloudFront / AWS does not have this issue.

And now we’re vendor locked-in :disappointed:

Not saying that they are doing a bait and switch, but shouldn’t Cloudflare mentioning their peering process on their Network / marketing pages?

2

Not sure what’s going on here (yes, doesn’t look too good), but I just wanted to mention that there is one additional parameter that could influence this behavior. The add-on service “Argo Smart Routing” optimizes the traffic between Cloudflare and your origin server, but also between the client and Cloudflare. You’ll find it under “Traffic” → “Argo” in the Cloudflare dashboard after selecting your domain name. I should mention that this is a paid feature (don’t shoot the messenger :smiley:) but it might be interesting to see what kind of effect it has in this case.

3

Your marketing team should really mention this on the public facing webpages.

There should really be an asterisks next to the blurb:

This means all customer traffic is processed at the data center closest to its source, with no backhauling or performance tradeoffs*

*requires additional extra paid service called Argo at US$5 per month, plus usage.

So that new customers know what to expect upfront.

4

For the record, I’m a random Cloudflare customer. Since you’re on the Pro plan, you may perhaps want to run this through Cloudflare support as well.

1 Like
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Their support basically told me to upgrade to the Enterprise plan if I want my zone to “always be served by the closest geographic colo and the highest priority of traffic” :frowning:

Not sure if this is related, but their Tiered Cache setting lies about HKG fallover to TPE, in reality looking at /cdn-cgi/trace it goes overseas to LAX:

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It’s just very disappointing to get bait and switched by Cloudflare’s marketing.

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