Improving Smart Tiered Cache for Public Cloud Regions
Curated from Cloudflare Blog
When distributing content across global edge networks, the latency introduced by back-to-origin requests remains a critical bottleneck. While many platforms default to arbitrary upstream selection, this approach often ignores the physical proximity of your origin infrastructure, leading to suboptimal routing paths. Smart Tiered Cache addresses this by allowing you to explicitly define which cloud regions serve as the upper tier for caching, based on your specific deployment topology. For teams managing multi-cloud or hybrid environments, this granularity transforms cache behavior from a black box into a predictable component of your architecture. You can align edge hit ratios with the actual location of your compute resources, reducing unnecessary cross-region data transfer costs and improving response times for end users. This level of control is essential for high-traffic applications where every millisecond of origin fetch time impacts both performance and infrastructure spend. Implement explicit region hints to ensure your cache layer respects your origin’s geographical distribution.
Smart Tiered Cache allows for precise upper tier selection for origins hosted on AWS, GCP, Azure, and Oracle Cloud with customer-provided cloud region hints.
— Cloudflare Blog