Two Free Cloudflare Services Cut Origin Load and Route Around Outages
Cloudflare is making two previously paid performance features free for all customers. Tiered Cache, part of the former Argo paid add-on for Free, Pro, and Business plans, and the new Orpheus service are now available without charge. Both are designed to reduce the load on origin servers and minimize the errors users encounter.
Tiered Cache: Reducing Origin Requests and Improving Hit Ratios
Tiered Cache works by organizing Cloudflare's data centers into a hierarchy of lower tiers and upper tiers. When content is not in the cache at a lower-tier data center—the one closest to the visitor—that lower tier can forward the request to an upper-tier center in the hierarchy. Only if the upper tier lacks the content does it then contact the origin server.
This simple hierarchy limits the number of data centers that can request content from an origin, which has two meaningful effects. It reduces the overall load on the origin, making web properties more economical to operate, and it increases cache hit ratios because connections are concentrated rather than spread across the entire network. Cloudflare reports that enabling Tiered Cache can produce a 60% or greater reduction in the cache miss rate when compared with its standard CDN service.
The structure also tends to make traffic paths shorter. Routes between Cloudflare data centers are generally faster and more reliable than the links between those data centers and an origin server. This reduces the distance traffic travels and lowers the number of open connections that an origin must service, as the requests funnel through a small number of data centers rather than the whole network.
Enabling the service is straightforward. In the Cloudflare dashboard, navigate to Caching, then select Tiered Cache and enable it. Customers are then automatically enrolled in Smart Tiered Cache Topology, which requires no additional configuration. Enterprise customers retain the option to pick from prefab topologies or have a custom one created.
Smart Tiered Cache picks the single best upper-tier data center for an origin automatically. Cloudflare collects latency data for every request to an origin and uses it to empirically pick the upper-tier center with the lowest latency to that particular origin.
Orpheus: Keeping Origins Reachable
The Internet is not uniform, and the paths between Cloudflare's network locations and an origin are not static. A server can be perfectly reachable from one part of the network while another segment experiences outages or congestion. This is why users can occasionally see a 522 error—the connection from Cloudflare to the origin failed somewhere along the network path, even when the origin itself is healthy and responding to traffic.
A 522 error happens when network instability breaks the path between Cloudflare and the origin, either on the way to the server or on the return trip. Both endpoints may be working, but the links between them are not. Orpheus is built to avoid exactly this scenario. It identifies unreachable or lossy paths in real time and steers traffic away from them, so an application remains reachable regardless of what is occurring on the public Internet.
How Orpheus Selects a Better Route
Orpheus determines routes from Cloudflare to an origin by analyzing network data on every path, evaluating them at a per-data-center level to reduce connection errors and minimize packet loss. When it detects problems on the active path, it shifts subsequent traffic to the healthiest available alternative.
The mechanism is comparable to Argo Smart Routing but with a different objective. Argo constantly directs traffic down the fastest path. Orpheus is reactionary: it only intervenes when the current path degrades and then guides traffic along a healthy route—not necessarily the fastest one.
Consider a simple example. A site in Chicago draws its traffic from three Cloudflare locations: Seattle, Boston, and Tampa. If a fiber cut severs the Tampa link to the Chicago origin, end users in Tampa will begin experiencing reachability failures unless traffic can be rerouted. Orpheus finds an alternate path for the Tampa traffic, routing it through a Cloudflare data center whose connection to the origin is unaffected, such as Boston or Seattle. The user experience continues because the traffic reaches the origin via a non-lossy route.
Measured Reachability Gains
During its rollout, Cloudflare measured Orpheus's impact on origin reachability. The service improved reachability by 23%, taking it from 99.87% to 99.90%.
The measurement compares 522 error rates for every data-center-to-origin pair, contrasting traffic that ran over Orpheus-routed paths against traffic that went directly back to the origin. The largest gains came from paths that were slightly lossy over time—their failures accumulated gradually rather than appearing in dramatic outages. A zero error rate is still not attainable, because some origins are genuinely unavailable regardless of the route taken.
Orpheus in Combination With Other Cloudflare Products
Orpheus integrates with several Cloudflare services to improve overall availability.
Load Balancing. Load Balancing chooses endpoints based on health probes, keeping a service online when an origin is not functioning. Orpheus guarantees that a reachable path exists to each of those endpoints. Together, they deliver high availability for every origin endpoint.
Cloudflare Network Interconnect (CNI). An origin that relies on a single transit provider represents a limitation for Orpheus—with no alternative path, there is no healthy route to steer traffic toward. CNI solves that problem by supplying a dedicated path independent of the transit provider that any Cloudflare data center can reach. Orpheus can then use that separate path from any location in the world when packet loss occurs on the public Internet.
Tiered Cache. The adaptive shield model pairs Orpheus with Tiered Cache to handle traffic efficiently. Tiered Cache deflects static requests away from the origin, minimizing load, while Orpheus ensures that requests that must arrive at the origin travel over the most reliable links available.
Both features are now in use by Cloudflare customers on all plans, giving sites a lower cache miss rate and reliable origin reachability without any added fees or configuration requirements.
