2026-07-106 min readIn 2021, we shipped Smart Tiered Cache. The idea: for each origin behind your site, Cloudflare picks the single best upper-tier data center to route through, based on real-time latency. Flip one switch, and we find the fastest path from our network to your origin.That works as long as an origin IP lives in one fixed place. Public cloud origins usually don't. They sit behind anycast or regional unicast front ends, so one origin IP can look equally close to a dozen Cloudflare data centers at once — and the latency probes have nothing to lock onto. Smart Tiered Cache handles this the safe way: when there's no clear winner, it falls back to several upper tiers. Nothing breaks. You just lose the thing that made a single closest tier worth it, which is cache efficiency.Smart Tiered Cache for Public Cloud Regions fixes this by letting you provide a cloud region hint. With that hint, Cloudflare can map public cloud origins to the right region and select better primary and fallback upper tiers, even when the origin IP itself looks anycast or ambiguous.
We made our most popular tiered cache topology smarter
Since it was launched, Smart Tiered Cache has become the most popular tiered cache topology among Cloudflare customers. It’s available to all plans, for free.Much of our work aims to continually improve it. Over time, we’ve extended Smart Tiered Cache to handle more origin architectures, including:November 2024: Smart Tiered Cache for R2: We taught Smart Tiered Cache to automatically select the closest upper tier to where the R2 bucket actually lives, reducing latency with zero configuration.January 2025: Smart Tiered Cache for Load Balancing: We extended Smart Tiered Cache to select a single optimal upper tier for an entire Load Balancing pool, so all origins in the pool share the same cache, improving hit ratios.Each of these improvements has shared a common goal: understand the customer’s origin infrastructure and automatically do the best thing for that infrastructure.While we’ve been improving this system for a while, customers still had a common frustration: Smart Tiered Cache did not work when an origin is behind an anycast or regional unicast network, because this architecture prevented us from knowing where the origin is located. And this wasn’t an edge case, either. Origins hosted on public cloud providers behind anycast IPs are a growing slice of the Internet.Today, we’re closing that gap for origins hosted on AWS, GCP, Azure, and Oracle Cloud.
