Cloudflare Waiting RoomTake control of the customer experience with a virtual queue.

Digital transformation has shifted traditional brickand-mortar services to online platforms. This overall
increase in Internet usage means origin servers
are inundated with legitimate requests during peaktraffic. The increased load on infrastructure has
left businesses unprepared to meet the fluctuating
demands on web applications.
The Cloudflare Waiting Room limits the number ofusers allowed in the application while placing excess
traffic into a virtual queue to provide a smoother, morepredictable user experience. Waiting Room protects
infrastructure from becoming over-burdened, reduces
errors served to users, and acts as an extension of thebrand — maintaining a seamless experience.

Waiting Room gates accessto applications

Route overflowing traffic to a custom-branded waiting room with automatic
enablement and disablement for each application.

Application thresholds

Manage flow dynamically

Waiting Room maintains custom limits forusers allowed in the web application bymonitoring and gating requests —providing
low latency and a seamless end userexperience.

Users are clustered based on time of request,
making it possible to let new users in assoon as active users leave the application orsession cookies expire. This way, no user isheld in the queue longer than required andestimated wait times are kept low.

Customization

Configuring Waiting Room

Cloudflare enables customization withHTML and CSS — offering flexible, granulartemplate design. Select from multiple
languages and custom branding options.
Create and deploy your waiting room with nodependencies on Cloudflare.

Get setup in minutes by filling out five
fields in the Cloudflare dashboard or via
API. No deployment or JavaScript tags
required. Automatically enable or disable
traffic queuing and take advantage of low
maintenance costs.

1 888 99 FLARE | enterprise@cloudflare.com | www.cloudflare.com

REV: 2020JAN01

Waiting Room overview

Protect your application from spikes in requests with a virtual waiting room.
Using encrypted cookies, Cloudflare issues a ticket to each visitor in thequeue and dynamically manages traffic flow.

Estimated wait time

Seamless user experience

Cloudflare continually syncs data within andacross colo locations for highly accurate wait
times. Plus, with a global Anycast network,
there is no single point of failure and Waiting
Room runs in each colo location.

When the number of visitors exceeds
limits set for the web application, users aregreeted with a waiting room page displaying
an estimated wait time that automatically
updates until they are permitted into theapplication.

Session duration

Define queue

Waiting Room remembers users for the lengthof time that the session cookie is valid (basedon a customizable session duration limit). Thisway, users do not have to re-queue if theynavigate away from the site and then returnto it.

Waiting Room queues are defined bycustomized limits of total active users,
inbound traffic spikes, and session duration(minutes). Choose between different queuing
methods to manage traffic — first-in-firstout, random, or lottery.

Waiting Room advantages
Simplicity

Visibility

Integrated services

Get set up using the Cloudflare
dashboard or via API and start
managing traffic flow in minutes— no coding or deployments
required. Set queuing logic, session
parameters, and more from a single
dashboard.

Access to real-time monitoringof traffic spikes across sliding
minute intervals, and rich historical
data including total active users,
maximum wait time, and number ofusers in queue.

Waiting Room integrates
seamlessly with other Cloudflare
performance and security
solutions, including DDoS
mitigation, WAF, Bot Management,
Load Balancing, and Page Rules.

Cloudflare advantages
The Cloudflare network spans over 200 cities inmore than 100 countries, enabling extremely fast
propagation time, with any edits or changes to thenetwork appearing in seconds. Plus, all Cloudflare
products run on every server in the Cloudflare network,
ensuring there is no single point of failure.
Cloudflare offers native mobile support and its
global, edge network means that your application's
performance and uptime is always covered — evenduring unexpected periods of high load.

1 888 99 FLARE | enterprise@cloudflare.com | www.cloudflare.com