Introducing Custom Regions for Precise Data Control

Cloudflare has expanded Regional Services, adding new predefined regions such as Turkey, UAE, IRAP, and ISMAP, and introducing Custom Regions, which let customers design their own boundaries.

The core of Regional Services is a structure where traffic is first received at the nearest data center worldwide to perform L3/L4 DDoS defense, and only then moved into the designated region for TLS termination and L7 processing. Even requests coming from outside are only decrypted after being passed into the region through Cloudflare's private backbone.

Custom Regions allows these boundaries to be defined directly by the customer instead of Cloudflare. For example:

• Single country: country_code == "TR"
• Multiple countries: country_code in ["DE", "FR", "NL"]
• Country exclusion: !(country_code in ["US", "CA", "MX"])

This expression is applied to data center metadata to create a region membership set, and as infrastructure changes, new data centers that match the conditions are automatically included. After that, routing selects the most appropriate in-region destination based on performance rankings per ingress point, skipping any nodes that are unavailable.

Cloudflare factors network signals such as latency, loss, and timeouts, along with capacity, load, and operational status, into this routing decision. Ultimately, the following principles are maintained:

• Never decrypt outside the region
• Select in real time among available in-region candidates
• If no valid destination exists, fail-close instead of processing outside the region

Initial use cases presented include localizing LLM inference within a specific country, marketing campaigns by country combination, operating regions tailored to government contracts, and governance configurations aligned with internal organizational structures such as EMEA, MENA, and APAC. Currently, Cloudflare Managed Regions can be activated immediately via the dashboard or API, while Custom Regions is not yet self-serve and requires working with an account team to set up.