Global traffic steering
Global traffic steering policies decide how a load balancer routes traffic to attached and healthy pools.
EDNS Client Subnet (ECS) support provides customers with more control over location-based steering during gray-clouded DNS resolutions and can be used for proximity or geo (country) steering.
Customers can configure their load balancer using the location_strategy parameter, which includes the properties prefer_ecs and mode.
prefer_ecs determines whether the ECS GeoIP should be preferred as the authoritative location.
| Type | Description |
|---|---|
"always" | Always prefers ECS. |
"never" | Never prefers ECS. |
"proximity" | Prefers ECS only when steering_policy="proximity". |
"geo" | Prefers ECS only when steering_policy="geo" and only supports country-level steering. |
mode determines the authoritative location when ECS is not preferred, does not exist in the request, or its GeoIP lookup is unsuccessful.
| Type | Description |
|---|---|
"pop" | Uses the Cloudflare PoP location. |
"resolver_ip" | Uses the DNS resolver GeoIP location. If the GeoIP lookup is unsuccessful, it uses the Cloudflare PoP location. |