Introducing Custom Regions for Precision Data Control

Cloudflare has expanded its Regional Services product to include four new pre-defined regions: Turkey, the United Arab Emirates (UAE), IRAP (Australian compliance), and ISMAP (Japanese compliance). Additionally, the company is introducing Custom Regions, a new feature that allows customers to define their own geographical boundaries for traffic processing.

Key Technical Details

Regional Services leverages Cloudflare's global network to provide local compliance and global-scale security. Traffic is ingested at the closest Cloudflare data center, where DDoS mitigation is applied at the network and transport layers. Intelligent in-region routing ensures that traffic is forwarded to a data center within the customer's specified region, using the most performant pathway. In-region TLS termination and L7 processing occur only once the traffic is confirmed to be within the chosen region.

Practical Implications for Developers

Custom Regions give developers the power to define their own geographical boundaries for traffic processing, unlocking a new level of control. This flexibility can be used to regionalize AI inference, launch hyper-targeted promotions, and optimize for performance and data localization legal obligations. With Custom Regions, developers can choose from a list of countries, unique combinations of countries, or exclude a set of countries from a region, providing a high degree of customization.

Timeline

Cloudflare has already added 35 regions to its Regional Services product, including the new pre-defined regions of Turkey, the UAE, IRAP, and ISMAP. Custom Regions are launching today, providing customers with the ability to request a custom region that meets their account needs.