Cloudflare's Edge Network

Cloudflare is not a cloud provider in the sense of EC2/Compute Engine, but it is the largest cloud network overlay. It sits in front of your infrastructure.

The Anycast Advantage

Cloudflare announces its IP ranges from over 300 cities worldwide. When a user requests your site, BGP routes them to the physically closest datacenter.

Argo Smart Routing

The public internet is congested. Routes fluctuate. Argo acts like a traffic-aware GPS for packets. Compare this with AWS Global Accelerator.

• Real-time Analytics: Cloudflare sees traffic from millions of sites. They know which internet paths are dropping packets or have high latency.
• Re-routing: Argo will route your request through Cloudflare's private connections or less congested public paths to reach your origin server up to 30% faster.

Cloudflare Tunnel (Cloudflared)

Historically, you had to open port 443 on your firewall to let the load balancer in. With Cloudflare Tunnel, your server makes an outbound connection to the Cloudflare edge. No inbound ports open. This creates a secure, zero-trust path for traffic.

Compare this with Native Cloud Routing to see if you need an overlay.