Azure’s Routing Preference now available to Cloudflare customers
Cloudflare customers can now select Microsoft Azure’s Routing Preference service to reduce data transfer costs. The integration, now generally available, gives mutual customers a lower-cost path that still delivers predictable performance across the two networks’ interconnected infrastructure. A number of customers are already using the new option in production.
The cost savings come from routing Azure-originated traffic directly to Cloudflare over dedicated interconnections rather than over the public internet. Cloudflare reports peering with more than 9,500 networks globally, including major ISPs, cloud providers, and enterprises. Azure interconnections currently span all major regions through both private and public peering, with private fiber links in select facilities and peered connections at Internet exchanges. In addition, Cloudflare notes it maintains five Internet exchanges with private peering and over 108 public peering links with Azure.
How traffic flows over the interconnect
To illustrate: a visitor in Sydney requesting content from an origin hosted in an Azure region in Chicago triggers a request that first reaches Cloudflare’s Sydney data center. From there, the request travels across Cloudflare’s network to Chicago, where it is handed over to Azure over private interconnections—no ISP is involved on the egress path. The response returns the same way, moving from Azure to Cloudflare at the Chicago origin and then across Cloudflare’s network back to the Sydney visitor.
Why interconnectivity matters
Customer choice is the core driver here, according to Cloudflare. The company emphasizes avoiding vendor lock-in and supporting open Internet standards. Working with Microsoft, the goal is to let customers combine best-of-breed services without being penalized by high egress fees.
“Microsoft Azure is committed to offering services that make it easy to use offerings from industry leaders like Cloudflare - enabling choice to address customer’s business need.” — Jeff Cohen, Partner Group Program Manager for Azure Networking
Three steps to enable
Enabling the cost-optimized routing is a simple configuration change. The process requires the following:
- Select Internet routing on your Azure dashboard for the origin in Azure storage.
- Enable Internet routing on your Firewall and virtual network tab.
- Enter the updated endpoint URLs from Azure into your Cloudflare dashboard.
Once enabled, the discount is applied automatically and reflected on the next monthly bill. Detailed rates are available in Azure’s Bandwidth pricing.
Early adopters report a straightforward setup and noticeable savings. Bannerflow’s Engineering Manager Joakim Jamte noted the process was “very smooth for us with minimal effort.” MyRadar.com Chief Architect Darin MacRae said egress fees had previously “restricted us from having more multi-cloud solutions since it can be high and unpredictable at times as the traffic scales,” and that enabling Routing Preference was “a one-and-done effort.” Act-3D CIO Arthur Roodenburg called the combination of Cloudflare’s security and CDN capabilities with the discounted Azure transfer rates “very compelling.”
Customers interested in adopting the Routing Preference integration can contact Cloudflare for details.
