Improving Smart Tiered Cache for Public Cloud Regions

Cloudflare's Smart Tiered Cache system, initially launched in 2021, optimizes data routing by selecting the best upper-tier data center based on real-time latency to enhance cache efficiency. However, traditional latency-based selection faced challenges with public cloud origins that utilize anycast or regional unicast networks, leading to inefficient routing paths or "hairpinning." To address this, Cloudflare introduced a feature that allows users to provide a cloud region hint, enabling the system to map public cloud origins to the appropriate region and select optimal upper tiers, even when the origin IPs appear ambiguous. This enhancement, which is available for free across all plans, fetches the latest IP range files from cloud providers like AWS, GCP, Azure, and Oracle Cloud to dynamically assign upper tiers based on continuous latency probing. By doing so, it aims to reduce latency and improve cache hit ratios for origins on anycast IPs, bridging a significant performance gap reported by customers.

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