Regions

The Globe edge network is located in some 300 cities in 100+ countries and is powered by Cloudflare’s network - which is milliseconds away from virtually every Internet user on the planet.

Our edge network is responsible for features such as DDoS mitigation, zero latency routing to our compute regions, instant rollbacks, A/B testing deployments and more. Caching also happens in the regional level, so cache hits are served directly from the routing region.

Compute Regions

Globe runs your deployments in 39 (currently) compute regions.

Globe compute regions will continue expanding into the following regions: Berlin (Germany), Dammam (Kingdom of Saudi Arabia), Querétaro (Mexico), Malaysia, Thailand, New Zealand, Greece, Norway, South Africa, Austria and Sweden.

Preferred Regions

In some cases, executing a request in a region closest to the user may not be desirable. Consider a user who hits your application from Europe but your application uses a region-specific database located in the United States.

Multiple outbound requests from Europe to the US data center could result in potentially long response times for the user whilst data is sent across the network. In this scenario, it may make more sense to handle the request in the US data center, and then return the response to the user from there.

This can be achieved by specifying the preferred region(s). When preferred regions are specified Globe will:

• if a single preferred region is provided: execute the request in the preferred region
  • if the specified region is unhealthy or experiencing an outage, then default global routing behavior is used and the nearest healthy region executes the request.
• if multiple regions are provided, Globe will choose the closest preferred region to the user and execute the request there
  • if any of specified regions are unhealthy or experiencing an outage, they will no longer be preferred.
  • if all of the specified regions are unhealthy or experiencing an outage, then default global routing behavior is used and the nearest healthy region executes the request.

Configure via Project Settings

Within the Globe dashboard, under Projects -> Select Project -> Settings -> Preferred Region, you can select a preferred region for your project.

When selecting preferred regions from the dashboard, this will only apply to new deployments.

Configure via X-Globe-Preferred-Region header

Specify IATA codes from the region list in the X-Globe-Preferred-Region header of a request.

For example: X-Globe-Preferred-Region: DFW, PDX

Note that when specifying a preferred region via the header this will override any preferred region(s) set in the Project Settings dashboard.

What are IATA codes?

IATA codes are 3-letter codes that represent airports. Globe uses IATA codes to designate compute and routing regions in the same area that it represents. For example, DFW is the IATA code for Dallas Fort Worth International Airport it is also the code for the Dallas compute region in North America. To check your current network's routing region's IATA code click here. The colo=XXX field specifies the code. The Globe infrastructure is built on top of the Cloudflare network, so the IATA codes are the same as Cloudflare's. The system then routes the request to the closest available compute region.