Traffic steering between orchestrators with Cloudflare

I have recently decided to go to the next stage and rent some GPUs in US, as I have been sad seeing my own Europe based GPUs staying mostly idle and transcoders in the US receiving a lot of task/rewards.

I liked the idea of @Titan-Node to load balance more orchestrators described beautifully in it’s topic, but as my domain is hosted in Cloudflare, there is the guide how to do it in their system.

First of all the load balancing service costs $5 per month for it’s minimal tier.

When you enable it you have to create a load balancer from Websites → your site/domain → trafficLoad Balancing

Even though CF already supports gRPC proxying, I have not yet been able to research/test it and I decided I’m leaving the Proxied option for the new domain disabled :

I do plan testing the gRPC proxy soon though, will keep you informed when I do.

Please note that if you’re configuring a load balancer with the name of a previous DNS record it replaces it automatically. It worked for me without a problem.

Next step in the wizard is to add a pool of origins or choose from already defined ones. At this stage I’m going for two pools - US and Europe, containing the addresses of the two orchestrators and defining Europe as the default fallback for everything I have not explicitly defined ( ignore the warning, you won’t see it when you do this for the first time :slight_smile: ) :

Next you are being provided with an option to attach a monitor to the pool, but of course you can do that lately. Currently I’m using a simple tcp port checker for tcp port 8935 :

Next yoiu need to choose the traffic steering policy for the domain. I have decided to go for explicitly defined zones with “Geo Steering”, but I guess you could use "Proximity Steering with similar results :

As you see I’m only creating zones and adding pools for US / Europe and leaving Asia/Africa/Pacific to use the fallback option from previous steps. You of course can define whatever is suitable to you

Skipping the next step as I did not have a need to use it, leads to the final step - review and deploy and that’s almost everything you need to start using the service :

Everything took me less than 1/2 an hour with almost no reading of manuals needed and Cloudflare proved to me one more time as way more intuitive and easy to use than AWS ( I have some experience with both to claim that )

Hopefully that becomes useful to someone , happy transcoding :slight_smile:

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Really appreciate you writing up this guide! Seems so much simpler than AWS.

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And don’t forget the other part of @Titan-Node’s topic concerning the orchestrators setup … It’s the same, no matter if it’s AWS or Cloudflare in front :slight_smile: