Global CDN Beta: Built-In Bot Protection, Now Available
We're excited to announce that our next-generation Global CDN, powered by Cloudflare, is now in beta for Pantheon customers.
After a successful Alpha phase where we validated common use cases and tuned bot protection across a set of early access sites, we're opening the doors wider.
Beta brings our upgraded CDN infrastructure to more customers, and comes with a major upgrade out of the box: bot protection that ensures the source of your traffic is legitimate, at no extra cost.
Once you migrate to the new GCDN, any spikes you see should be from verified bot traffic- not malicious sources.
Bot traffic is one of the highest hidden costs in web operations. With Pantheon’s new Global CDN, bot protection is built into the infrastructure itself.
That means fewer unwanted requests hitting your application servers, more consistent performance for actual users, and one less tool to procure and manage. It's protection that works the moment you activate—no extra contracts, no added complexity.
Go to your site dashboard in Pantheon today to get started.
What This Means for Your Sites
If your site is eligible for the beta, you'll see a banner on your Pantheon dashboard. Getting started is straightforward:
- Look for the GCDN Beta banner on your site dashboard.
- Click the banner and follow the guided activation steps.
- Update your DNS records to point to the new GCDN infrastructure.
Your existing caching behavior carries over, including support for the Pantheon Advanced Page Cache module (Drupal) and plugin (WordPress). The granular, surrogate-key-based cache clearing you rely on today works the same way on the new infrastructure.
Who Is This For?
The beta is open to most Pantheon GCDN customers running Drupal or WordPress sites. The following configurations are not yet eligible:
- Sites on Advanced Global CDN (AGCDN)—AGCDN has its own dedicated migration initiative and timeline, currently slated for H2 2026.
- Sites with Custom Certificates.
- Sites with enabled Multi-Zone Failover.
- Next.js / Front-End Sites (FES).
We'll be expanding eligibility as we move toward General Availability in Q2 2026.
What's Next
The beta period is designed to give us — and you — confidence at scale. Our goals for this phase:
- Validate performance and reliability at scale while refining compatibility across diverse site architectures and use cases.
- Collect your feedback to shape the experience before GA.
After beta, general availability will support 100% migration of GCDN customers, and new sites will automatically use the upgraded CDN.
Get Involved
We want your feedback throughout the beta. Join #beta-gcdn in the Pantheon Community Slack to share your experience, report issues, or ask questions.
We'll be publishing updated documentation as the beta progresses, including FAQs and detailed guides for the migration process.
Go to your site dashboard in Pantheon today to get started.
