Add section to dev pages on "DNS Persistence" #24074
Description
Proposed changes
Hi documentation team. I am a Cloudflare Solutions Engineer for public sector. A customer earlier in this year reached out to me asking if we could do DNS Persistence like one of our competitors does. I was confused by our documentation then because at that time we said we could do "standard" session affinity for DNS-only load balancing. That confusion was corrected already, but I do think a further improvement can be made. While we can't do session affinity for DNS-only load balancing (no one can, there are no sessions to track), we can do what other load balancer vendors describe as "DNS Persistence". This is a bit different but related. Our competitors call this out as a feature of their platform, so I think it may be helpful if we also documented how to set it up in our public documentation.
I have written a wiki post based on the information that I gave my customer: https://wiki.cfdata.org/pages/viewpage.action?pageId=1220800915 You can feel free to use my wiki (boil it down and sanitize it) to write a DNS persistence article to insert in the documentation. If this piece of documentation were available it would have saved me probably 6 or 8 hours of work that I did for my customer to test and document the feature. I could have just pointed him to the webpage and not had to learn the ropes myself and document it for him. So probably it will help make other engineers more efficient to have documentation on this topic to point their customers to. My Wiki also references the competitor's article my customer gave to me.
Please feel free to reach out if I can be of any more assistance on this topic. Thanks!
Thanks.
Subject Matter
The "DNS Persistence" feature in Cloudflare DNS-Only loadbalancing
Content Location
At least three changes should be made in my opinion:
I would suggest a new page/section entitled "DNS Persistence" or "DNS Persistence for DNS-only loadbalancers" is created between
https://developers.cloudflare.com/load-balancing/understand-basics/session-affinity/. and
https://developers.cloudflare.com/load-balancing/understand-basics/adaptive-routing/
The new page could be based on summarized/sanitized content from the wiki I wrote here:
https://wiki.cfdata.org/pages/viewpage.action?pageId=1220800915
Beyond that, any mention of the fact that we can't do session affinity for DNS-only load balancing should be qualified by the fact that we can configure DNS Persistence for DNS-only load balancers. I can see at least two instances where this could be hyperlinked back to the new page:
On page,https://developers.cloudflare.com/load-balancing/understand-basics/session-affinity/,
I suggest that the note on this page should be updated to the following text... text should be added:
Important!! Session Affinity is not supported in DNS-only mode (gray cloud), however, you may configure DNS Persistence.
(DNS Persistence could be a hyperlink to the new page on the topic of DNS Persistence)
On in the following page#section: https://developers.cloudflare.com/load-balancing/understand-basics/proxy-modes/#limitations,
I suggest that where the limitation is spelled out, a caveat is added:
"Does not support session affinity.", however may be configured to support DNS persistence.
(DNS Persistence could be a hyperlink to a new page on the topic of DNS Persistence)
Additional information
If I can be of further assistance, please reach out! Thanks.