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Help me understand how traffic flow from edge POP to origin of Bandwidth alliance partner(s).
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Help me understand how traffic flow from edge POP to origin of Bandwidth alliance partner(s).

As far I read so far, (unless you're using Argo) in default mode when a user's request hit a nearest Cloudflare PoP, they route the traffic from that PoP through public internet to the origin server. This is easier to understand as they want to offload the traffic asap from their network.

But I want to understand what happens with traffic is going to origin server of their bandwidth alliance partner(s) or partner they are peering with. Let's say the origin server is hosted with Scaleway in Amsterdam and a user request hit a nearest PoP in Singapore. Things to consider is Scaleway peer in PAR and AMS compare to Cloudflare who peer with almost anyone and anywhere.

So does Cloudflare offload the traffic in Singapore and it goes through IP transit provider(s) of Scaleway to reach origin server?

OR

They keep the traffic in their network till it reach to one of the IX where they are peering with Scaleway and offload the traffic to them there?

Comments

  • yoursunnyyoursunny Member, IPv6 Advocate

    You can find out with this experiment:

    1. Setup origin site in Scaleway.
    2. Visit the site from Singapore.
    3. Use tcpdump on the origin to see what Cloudflare IP is connecting to your origin.
    4. From Scaleway run traceroute to that IP.

    If the traceroute shows transit providers, the traffic goes over public Internet.
    Otherwise, it's more likely to travel inside Cloudflare network.

    Thanked by 2kennsann bulbasaur
  • adlyadly Veteran

    Not sure about bandwidth alliance partners, but with Argo they route using the Cloudflare network to the POP nearest the destination before handoff, and given they relate the bandwidth alliance to peering I suspect they use their peering relationships to reduce transit costs as much as possible.

  • @yoursunny Someone mentioned on community.cloudflare.com that the traffic from Cloudflare PoP will go thru public internet to Scaleway origin (ingress) but as the traffic from Scaleway to Cloudflare (egress) will go thru the peering IX and use cloudflare backbone to reach that PoP. Does this make sense?

    @adly Cloudflare only promise discount or nil cost with their bandwidth alliance partner(s). I don't think they mention any improved traffic route or performance tho.

  • adlyadly Veteran

    @desibanda said:
    @adly Cloudflare only promise discount or nil cost with their bandwidth alliance partner(s). I don't think they mention any improved traffic route or performance tho.

    Who said anything about improved routing or performance? It would make more sense to keep traffic on their network or free peers simply to minimise cost, which may or may not be the best route.

    That’s not to say they do this - unless they come out and explain their routing for bandwidth alliance partners then it’s anyone’s guess (though can be an educated guess through testing).

  • Damn, this program is actually really cool.

    Deployed some servers at Linode in Singapore, and noticed that incoming traffic are sent only by Cloudflare's Singapore colo instead of the client's country POP.

    So if client is connecting from Cloudflare's Sydney POP, it will use their Argo backbone to Singapore, same from Europe/US.

    If I enrolled to Argo, would be paying $5 + $0.10/gb per month..

    Wonder why other cloud providers are not interested to join this program.. It's actually beneficial for them too, as traffic are going through exchange/PNI instead of public. 🤔

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