Load Balancing review

Cloudflare’s load balancer handles global traffic steering, health checks, failover, and session affinity dependably. Geographic and latency-based steering work as advertised. Health checks from multiple regions give you a trustworthy view of each origin.

The billing is the biggest problem. It is genuinely hard to work out what you pay for: is it per HTTP request, per DNS query, per origin, per monitor? The pricing details are not in the docs at all. You find them on the dashboard, mid-purchase, which is not where pricing questions should get answered. Costs also creep up quickly as you add pools and monitors, in a way that feels disconnected from the rest of the platform.

The UI has not kept up either. Managing many pools across several load balancers gets tedious, and larger setups soon move to Terraform. The core product is solid. The way you buy and operate it needs a refresh.