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CONCEPT Cited by 1 source

Geographic fallback

Definition

Geographic fallback is the bootstrap strategy where a topology-selection system that normally relies on empirical data (latency probes, weighted votes) falls back to pure geographic proximity when insufficient data is available for a given region or origin.

Example (Cloudflare Smart Tiered Cache)

When a new cloud region has no origins onboarded to Cloudflare (so nothing to probe and no subnets to vote on), the system selects the closest Tier-1 PoP by geography as the upper tier. As origins come online and probe data accumulates, the region "quietly switches from that geographic guess to the option backed by real data."

Design Properties

  • Safe default: geographic proximity is a reasonable approximation of network proximity in most cases.
  • Self-healing: the system automatically upgrades to data-driven selection without operator intervention.
  • No cold-start failure: new regions work immediately rather than returning errors or degrading to no tiered caching at all.

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