Magic Transit is a network infrastructure solution provided by Cloudflare that protects and optimizes traffic for internet applications. It combines Cloudflare's DDoS protection, load balancing, and IP transit solutions into one package. The main idea behind Magic Transit is to provide a secure and reliable way to route internet traffic to and from an organization's network. One of the key features of Magic Transit is its DDoS protection capabilities. It uses Cloudflare's extensive network infrastructure to absorb and mitigate DDoS attacks before they reach the organization's network. By analyzing traffic patterns and applying machine learning algorithms, Magic Transit can identify and block malicious traffic, preventing service disruptions and ensuring the availability of applications and services.

Magic Transit makes your network smarter, better, stronger, and cheaper to operate

Today we’re excited to announce Cloudflare Magic Transit. Magic Transit provides secure, performant, and reliable IP connectivity to the Internet. Out-of-the-box, Magic Transit deployed in front of your on-premise network protects it from DDoS attack and enables provisioning of a full suite of virtual network functions, including advanced packet filtering, load balancing, and traffic management tools.

Magic Transit is built on the standards and networking primitives you are familiar with, but delivered from Cloudflare’s global edge network as a service. Traffic is ingested by the Cloudflare Network with anycast and BGP, announcing your company’s IP address space and extending your network presence globally. Today, our anycast edge network spans 193 cities in more than 90 countries around the world.

Once packets hit our network, traffic is inspected for attacks, filtered, steered, accelerated, and sent onward to the origin. Magic Transit will connect back to your origin infrastructure over Generic Routing Encapsulation (GRE) tunnels, private network interconnects (PNI), or other forms of peering.

Enterprises are often forced to pick between performance and security when deploying IP network services. Magic Transit is designed from the ground up to minimize these trade-offs: performance and security are better together. Magic Transit deploys IP security services across our entire global network. This means no more diverting traffic to small numbers of distant “scrubbing centers” or relying on on-premise hardware to mitigate attacks on your infrastructure.

We’ve been laying the groundwork for Magic Transit for as long as Cloudflare has been in existence, since 2010. Scaling and securing the IP network Cloudflare is built on has required tooling that would have been impossible or exorbitantly expensive to buy. So we built the tools ourselves! We grew up in the age of software-defined networking and network function virtualization, and the principles behind these modern concepts run through everything we do.

When we talk to our customers managing on-premise networks, we consistently hear a few things: building and managing their networks is expensive and painful, and those on-premise networks aren’t going away anytime soon.

Traditionally, CIOs trying to connect their IP networks to the Internet do this in two steps:

1. Source connectivity to the Internet from transit providers (ISPs).
2. Purchase, operate, and maintain network function specific hardware appliances. Think hardware load balancers, firewalls, DDoS mitigation equipment, WAN optimization, and more.

Each of these boxes costs time and money to maintain, not to mention the skilled, expensive people required to properly run them. Each additional link in the chain makes a network harder to manage.

This all sounded familiar to us. We had an aha! moment: we had the same issues managing our datacenter networks that power all of our products, and we had spent significant time and effort building solutions to those problems. Now, nine years later, we had a robust set of tools we could turn into products for our own customers.

Magic Transit aims to bring the traditional datacenter hardware model into the cloud, packaging transit with all the network “hardware” you might need to keep your network fast, reliable, and secure. Once deployed, Magic Transit allows seamless provisioning of virtualized network functions, including routing, DDoS mitigation, firewalling, load balancing, and traffic acceleration services.

By analyzing traffic patterns and applying machine learning algorithms, Magic Transit can identify and block malicious traffic, preventing service disruptions and ensuring the availability of applications and services. Another important aspect of Magic Transit is its load balancing functionality. It distributes incoming traffic across multiple servers or data centers, ensuring optimal performance and preventing any single point of failure.

Magic Transit is your network’s on-ramp to the Internet

Magic Transit delivers its connectivity, security, and performance benefits by serving as the “front door” to your IP network. This means it accepts IP packets destined for your network, processes them, and then outputs them to your origin infrastructure.

Connecting to the Internet via Cloudflare offers numerous benefits. Starting with the most basic, Cloudflare is one of the most extensively connected networks on the Internet. We work with carriers, Internet exchanges, and peering partners around the world to ensure that a bit placed on our network will reach its destination quickly and reliably, no matter the destination.

An example deployment: Acme Corp

Let’s walk through how a customer might deploy Magic Transit. Customer Acme Corp. owns the IP prefix 203.0.113.0/24, which they use to address a rack of hardware they run in their own physical datacenter. Acme currently announces routes to the Internet from their customer-premise equipment (CPE, aka a router at the perimeter of their datacenter), telling the world 203.0.113.0/24 is reachable from their autonomous system number, AS64512. Acme has DDoS mitigation and firewall hardware appliances on-premise.

Acme wants to connect to the Cloudflare Network to improve the security and performance of their own network. Specifically, they’ve been the target of distributed denial of service attacks, and want to sleep soundly at night without relying on on-premise hardware. This is where Cloudflare comes in.

Deploying Magic Transit in front of their network is simple:

1. Cloudflare uses Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) to announce Acme’s 203.0.113.0/24 prefix from Cloudflare’s edge, with Acme’s permission.
2. Cloudflare begins ingesting packets destined for the Acme IP prefix.
3. Magic Transit applies DDoS mitigation and firewall rules to the network traffic. After it is ingested by the Cloudflare network, traffic that would benefit from HTTPS caching and WAF inspection can be “upgraded” to our Layer 7 HTTPS pipeline without incurring additional network hops.
4. Acme would like Cloudflare to use Generic Routing Encapsulation (GRE) to tunnel traffic back from the Cloudflare Network back to Acme’s datacenter. GRE tunnels are initiated from anycast endpoints back to Acme’s premise. Through the magic of anycast, the tunnels are constantly and simultaneously connected to hundreds of network locations, ensuring the tunnels are highly available and resilient to network failures that would bring down traditionally formed GRE tunnels.
5. Cloudflare egresses packets bound for Acme over these GRE tunnels.

Let’s dive deeper on how the DDoS mitigation included in Magic Transit works.

This load balancing capability helps organizations handle high traffic loads, improve response times, and enhance the overall user experience. Magic Transit also provides IP transit services, allowing organizations to connect their network to the internet using Cloudflare's reliable network of data centers. By leveraging Cloudflare's extensive network infrastructure, organizations can benefit from improved network performance, reduced latency, and enhanced security. In summary, Magic Transit is a comprehensive network infrastructure solution offered by Cloudflare that combines DDoS protection, load balancing, and IP transit functionalities to provide a secure and reliable way to route internet traffic. Its main focus is on protecting against DDoS attacks, optimizing traffic distribution, and enhancing network performance. By leveraging Cloudflare's network infrastructure, organizations can ensure the availability, security, and performance of their applications and services..

Reviews for "Getting Started with Cloudflare's Magic Transit Solution."

1. John - 2 stars - I was really disappointed with Magic transit cloudflare. I had high hopes for this service, expecting it to significantly improve my website's performance and security. However, I didn't notice any significant difference after implementing it. The service was also quite expensive, especially considering the lack of results. I would not recommend Magic transit cloudflare to others.

2. Sarah - 3 stars - I had mixed experiences with Magic transit cloudflare. While it did offer some level of protection against DDoS attacks, it also caused several technical issues for my website. I constantly had to deal with server errors and slow loading times, which affected the user experience and ultimately resulted in a decrease in traffic. Additionally, the customer support provided by Magic transit cloudflare was subpar, with slow response times and unhelpful solutions.

3. Michael - 1 star - Magic transit cloudflare was a complete waste of time and money for me. I expected it to provide an extra layer of security for my website, but it turned out to be ineffective against sophisticated cyber attacks. My website still got hacked, and I experienced data breaches despite having Magic transit cloudflare in place. Furthermore, the service caused my website to slow down significantly, leading to a decline in user engagement and conversions. I regret using Magic transit cloudflare and would not recommend it to anyone.

Magic Transit: The Ultimate Solution for DDoS Protection.