Custom Regions: Define Your Own Data Boundaries
Cloudflare has unveiled Custom Regions, a significant evolution to its Regional Services product that gives customers full control over geographical data localization. Instead of choosing from Cloudflare's 35 pre-defined regions, users can now specify exactly which countries constitute their region using simple expression-based rules.
Key Capabilities
Custom Regions support flexible boundary definitions:
- Single or multiple countries: Define regions as
country_code == "TR"for Turkey, orcountry_code in ["DE", "FR", "NL"]for Germany, France, and the Netherlands - Exclusion-based rules: Exclude specific countries with
!(country_code in ["US", "CA", "MX"]) - Dynamic membership: Cloudflare automatically updates region membership as infrastructure evolves; new data centers matching your criteria are added without manual intervention
How It Maintains Global Protection
Custom Regions preserve Cloudflare's unique hybrid architecture: traffic enters at the closest global data center for massive-scale DDoS mitigation at L3/L4 layers. Metadata inspection then intelligently routes requests across Cloudflare's private backbone to in-region data centers, where TLS termination and Layer 7 processing (WAF, Bot Management, Workers) occur. This approach ensures customers meet data sovereignty obligations without sacrificing the security benefits of global scale.
Real-World Use Cases
Early-access customers have already deployed Custom Regions for:
- AI inference localization: Keeping LLM prompts and responses within specific countries for compliance and performance
- Hyper-targeted campaigns: Serving marketing content optimized for unique country combinations
- Government operations: Aligning regions with contractual commitments and regulatory requirements
- Corporate structure alignment: Creating regions that match internal business units (EMEA, MENA, APAC)
New Managed Regions
In addition to Custom Regions, Cloudflare is expanding its managed region offerings to include Turkey, UAE, IRAP (Australian compliance), and ISMAP (Japanese compliance), bringing the total pre-defined region count to 35.