Common configurations

Consider the following sections to understand how to achieve some commonly used load balancer configurations.

This page assumes you understand the Cloudflare Load Balancing components and how to create and edit each of them.

Active - Passive Failover

An active-passive failover sends traffic to the endpoints in your active pool until a failure threshold (configurable) is reached. At the point of failure, your load balancer then redirects traffic to the passive pool.

This setup ensures uninterrupted service and helps with planned outages, but it might lead to slower traffic overall.

To set up a load balancer with active-passive failover:

1. Create a load balancer with two pools (primary and secondary).
2. In the list of pools, set the following order:
   1. primary
   2. secondary
3. For Traffic Steering, select Off.

With this setup, your load balancer will direct all traffic to primary until primary has fewer available endpoints than specified in its Health Threshold. Only then will your load balancer direct traffic to secondary.

In the event that all pools are marked down, Cloudflare uses the fallback pool, which is the option of last resort for successfully sending traffic to an endpoint. Since the fallback pool is a last resort, its health is not taken into account, and Cloudflare reports its status as No Health. You can select the fallback pool via the API or in the Cloudflare dashboard. For more on working with fallback pools, refer to Pool-level steering.

Active - Active Failover

An active-active failover distributes traffic to endpoints in the same pool until the pool reaches its failure threshold (configurable). At the point of failure, your load balancer would then re-direct traffic to the fallback pool.

This setup speeds up overall requests, but is more vulnerable to planned or unplanned outages.

To set up a load balancer with active-active failover, either:

• Create a load balancer with a single pool (primary) with multiple endpoints (endpoint-1 and endpoint-2) and set the same Weight for each endpoint.
• Create a load balancer with two pools (primary and secondary) and — for Traffic Steering — select any option except for Off.

Note

For more background reading on server failover and common configurations, refer to our Learning Center ↗.