“You can accomplish anything if you do it. Nothing will be accomplished unless you do it. If nothing is not accomplished, that’s because no one did it.“— Yozan Uesugi

Long hours and hard work. If you ask anyone in Japan what our work culture is like, chances are, these are the words that will come to mind. Different countries have their own cultures and also specific work habits and ways of having a work-life balance. The pandemic brought everyone (companies and their people) a new reality, new lessons, and new habits. Here at Cloudflare, our thinking around where and how we do our best work has evolved over the course of the pandemic. We care about addressing the diverse needs of our workforce and our policies and benefits are designed to optimize for their flexibility and needs. To that end, Cloudflare Japan is making a few important changes to our employee benefits:

• “take what you need” time off for all our employees

• 16-week gender-neutral paid parental leave

• flexible working hours

First, let’s try to understand a bit of the Japanese work culture. According to Japan’s labor laws, Japanese employed workers are assumed to work a maximum of 8 hours a day, or 40 hours per week. But ask any employed person in Japan and you will soon discover that people work much longer hours than that. A 2015 study by the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) found that about 22% of Japanese employees work 50 hours or more each week on average, well above 11% in the U.S., and 6% in Spain. On top of that, people are also less likely to take personal time off. While existing labor laws provide every employed person with at least 10 days of annual leave (+1 day for every year of service, usually capped at 20 days), a 2017 General Survey on Working Conditions published by the Ministry of Health, Labor, and Welfare found that on average, people only actually took 8.8 days of annual leave per year.

Then came the COVID-19 pandemic and things started to change. With restrictions put in place, a lot of us had no choice but to work from home, a concept that’s completely foreign to the Japanese work culture. And now two years into the pandemic, there has been a shift in the Japanese way of working. In a recent Zero Trust survey that Cloudflare conducted in Japan, 74% of IT and cybersecurity decision makers said their organization will be implementing a combination of return-to-office and work-from-home. This means that the future of work in Japan is flexible.

While we encourage our teams to always get their work across the finish line, we also appreciate the value and importance of having personal time to be able to spend with loved ones, take up a hobby, or simply for rest and relaxation. We believe that time away from work helps you be better at work. Our time away from work policies are designed for that and reflect the reality that technology has enabled us to be more mobile and flexible in the 21st century.

On parental leave, we strongly believe that parents should have equal opportunity to bond with their new family member, and don’t believe in forcing a parent to designate themselves as a “primary” or “secondary” caregiver. We believe these designations create a false dichotomy that does not reflect the modern family, nor reflect our values of diversity and equality; especially when we know that these designations typically disadvantage the careers of women more than men in the workplace.

Lastly, we remain committed to providing great physical spaces for our employees to work, collaborate, and celebrate in, while they’re in the office. While remote work is currently still the norm, it will be up to teams and individuals to decide what works best for them for the task at hand. People may wish to come into our offices to meet with their colleagues, socialize, or join on-site workshops, but then choose to do their quiet focus time work from home. As such, we just completely redesigned and renovated our offices in San Francisco and London —  starting with these offices with experimentation in-mind and with the purpose of reimagining our other global offices. Our way of working has changed, and as such our spaces should support this shift, to be a place where teams can come together and collaborate most effectively.

Cloudflare has had a longstanding presence in Japan, expanding our network into Tokyo in 2010, just months after launching. Today, we have seven points of presence across four cities, and we also announced our Tokyo office in 2020.

Also, it’s important to mention that in Q4 2021, Cloudflare blocked an average of 1.9 billion attacks per day in Japan. That number has grown to 3.8 billion attacks per day blocked by Cloudflare in Q1 2022, an increase of 100% since the previous quarter.

My goal when I joined Cloudflare almost six months ago remains the same — to help customers in Japan accelerate their digital transformation, that will in turn help improve Japan’s competitiveness in the world. In order to do this, we need to continue to provide a great work environment and build a great team. And we’re just getting started!

We are actively recruiting in Japan and have many open roles across different functions. If you’d like to join us in our mission to help build a better Internet, come talk to us!

Just after 1200 UTC on Tuesday, June 7, the Africa-Asia-Europe-1 (AAE-1) and SEA-ME-WE-5 (SMW-5) submarine cables suffered cable cuts. The damage reportedly occurred in Egypt, and impacted Internet connectivity for millions of Internet users across multiple countries in the Middle East and Africa, as well as thousands of miles away in Asia. In addition, Google Cloud Platform and OVHcloud reported connectivity issues due to these cable cuts.

Data from Cloudflare Radar showed significant drops in traffic across the impacted countries as the cable damage occurred, recovering approximately four hours later as the cables were repaired.

It appears that Saudi Arabia may have also been affected by the cable cut(s), but the impact was much less significant, and traffic recovered almost immediately.

In the graphs above, we show that Ethiopia was one of the impacted countries. However, as it is landlocked, there are obviously no submarine cable landing points within the country. The Afterfibre map from the Network Startup Resource Center (NSRC) shows that that fiber in Ethiopia connects to fiber in Somalia, which experienced an impact. In addition, Ethio Telecom also routes traffic through network providers in Kenya and Djibouti. Djibouti Telecom, one of these providers, in turn peers with larger global providers like Telecom Italia (TI) Sparkle, which is one of the owners of SMW5.

In addition to impacting end-user connectivity in the impacted countries, the cable cuts also reportedly impacted cloud providers including Google Cloud Platform and OVHcloud. In their incident report, Google Cloud noted “Google Cloud Networking experienced increased packet loss for egress traffic from Google to the Middle East, and elevated latency between our Europe and Asia Regions as a result, for 3 hours and 12 minutes, affecting several related products including Cloud NAT, Hybrid Connectivity and Virtual Private Cloud (VPC). From preliminary analysis, the root cause of the issue was a capacity shortage following two simultaneous fiber-cuts.” OVHcloud noted that “Backbone links between Marseille and Singapore are currently down” and that “Upon further investigation, our Network OPERATION teams advised that the fault was related to our partner fiber cuts.”

When concurrent disruptions like those highlighted above are observed across multiple countries in one or more geographic areas, the culprit is often a submarine cable that connects the impacted countries to the global Internet. The impact of such cable cuts will vary across countries, largely due to the levels of redundancy that they may have in place. That is, are these countries solely dependent on an impacted cable for global Internet connectivity, or do they have redundant connectivity across other submarine or terrestrial cables? Additionally, the location of the country relative to the cable cut will also impact how connectivity in a given country may be affected. Due to these factors, we didn’t see a similar impact across all of the countries connected to the AAE-1 and SMW5 cables.

Specific details are sparse, but as noted above, the cable damage reportedly occurred in Egypt – both of the impacted cables land in Abu Talat and Zafarana, which also serve as landing points for a number of other submarine cables. According to a 2021 article in Middle East Eye, “There are 10 cable landing stations on Egypt’s Mediterranean and Red Sea coastlines, and some 15 terrestrial crossing routes across the country.” Alan Mauldin, research director at telecommunications research firm TeleGeography, notes that routing cables between Europe and the Middle East to India is done via Egypt, because there is the least amount of land to cross. This places the country in a unique position as a choke point for international Internet connectivity, with damage to infrastructure locally impacting the ability of millions of people thousands of miles away to access websites and applications, as well as impacting connectivity for leading cloud platform providers.

As the graphs above show, traffic returned to normal levels within a matter of hours, with tweets from telecommunications authorities in Pakistan and Oman also noting that Internet services had returned to their countries. Such rapid repairs to submarine cable infrastructure are unusual, as repair timeframes are often measured in days or weeks, as we saw with the cables damaged by the volcanic eruption in Tonga earlier this year. This is due to the need to locate the fault, send repair ships to the appropriate location, and then retrieve the cable and repair it. Given this, the damage to these cables likely occurred on land, after they came ashore.

By deploying in data centers close to end users, Cloudflare helps to keep traffic local, which can mitigate the impact of catastrophic events like cable cuts, while improving performance, availability, and security. Being able to deliver content from our network generally requires first retrieving it from an origin, and with end users around the world, Cloudflare needs to be able to reach origins from multiple points around the world at the same time. However, a customer origin may be reachable from some networks but not from others, due to a cable cut or some other network disruption.

In September 2021, Cloudflare announced Orpheus, which provides reachability benefits for customers by finding unreachable paths on the Internet in real time, and guiding traffic away from those paths, ensuring that Cloudflare will always be able to reach an origin no matter what is happening on the Internet.

Because the Internet is an interconnected network of networks, an event such as a cable cut can have a ripple effect across the whole Internet, impacting connectivity for users thousands of miles away from where the incident occurred. Users may be unable to access content or applications, or the content/applications may suffer from reduced performance. Additionally, the providers of those applications may experience problems within their own network infrastructure due to such an event.

For network providers, the impact of such events can be mitigated through the use of multiple upstream providers/peers, and diverse physical paths for critical infrastructure like submarine cables. Cloudflare’s globally deployed network can help content and application providers ensure that their content and applications remain available and performant in the face of network disruptions.

I joined Cloudflare in March to lead Partnerships & Alliances for Asia Pacific, Japan, and China (APJC). In the last month I’ve been asked many times: “Why Cloudflare?” I’ll be honest, I’ve had opportunities to join other technology companies, but no other organization excited me more than Cloudflare. So I jumped. And I couldn’t be more thrilled for the opportunity to build a strong partner ecosystem for APJC.

When I considered joining Cloudflare, I recall consistently reading the message around “Helping to Build a Better Internet”. At first those words didn’t connect with me, but they sounded like an important mission.

I did my research and read analyst reports to learn about Cloudflare's market position, and then it dawned on me, Cloudflare is leading a transformation. Taking traditional on-premise networking and security hardware and building a transformational cloud-based solution, so customers don’t need to worry about which company supplied their kit. I was excited to learn that Cloudflare customers can simply access the vast global network that has been designed to make everything that customers connect to on the Internet secure, private, fast, and reliable. So hasn’t this been done before? For compute and storage that transformation is almost a commodity now, but for networking and security, Cloudflare is leading that transformation and I want to be part of that.

As I continued to learn more about Cloudflare, I connected with the mission of Project Galileo, Cloudflare's response to cyber attacks launched against important, yet vulnerable groups such as social activists, humanitarian organizations, minority groups and the voices of political dissent, who are repeatedly flooded with malicious cyber attacks in an attempt to take them offline. I was inspired that Cloudflare was part of something beyond a technology transformation. Vulnerable groups and communities who are part of Project Galileo, have access to Cloudflare security services at no cost.

So now that I’m on the inside I shouldn’t be surprised that I continue to find reasons why Cloudflare is the place to work for. Female leadership is well represented, including our President, COO, and co-founder, Michelle Zatlyn, who took the time to meet me during the interview process, and Jen Taylor our Chief Product Officer, whom I met while she was in Sydney meeting customers and partners, gave me a warm welcome.

In my third week in the company, I met a new colleague at a team gathering. We immediately hit it off chatting and getting to know each other. She had built a career in the sports industry which was ripped from under her during the pandemic, where she was one of the many who lost their jobs. What inspired me about her story was how Cloudflare embraced this as an opportunity to bring diverse talent into the company. They opened their virtual arms and doors to offer her an opportunity to build a career. Cloudflare crafted a path that led her into a Business Development role and now into an Associate Solutions Engineer role. Who does that? Cloudflare does, and I’m working with inspiring leaders who are committed to making that happen.

Finally, early in my career I learned the importance of working with Partners. It is important to commit to joint goals, build trust, celebrate success and carry each other through the trenches when things get tough. As a freshly anointed Cloudflare employee, my top priority is to build a strong culture of partnering. Partners are an important extension of our team and through Partners we can provide customers with deeper engagement and expert knowledge on Cloudflare products and services. My initial priority will be to focus on building Zero Trust Partner Practices supporting a significant number of APJC businesses who are planning a Zero Trust strategy, driven by an increase in cyber attacks. This year, we are rolling out sales and technical enablement, in addition to marketing funding to accelerate the ramp up of our Zero Trust partners.

In addition, the team will lean into partnerships who offer professional services and consulting practices that can support customer implementations. Our partners are critical to our joint success, and together we can support customers in their journey through network and security transformation. Finally, I’m excited to share that our co-founders Matthew Prince and Michelle Zatlyn will be in Sydney in September for Cloudflare Connect. I look forward to leveraging that platform to share more detail on the APJC Partnerships strategy and launching the APJC Partner Advisory Board.

I’m excited to announce that I recently joined Cloudflare in Japan as Vice-President and Managing Director, to help build and expand our customer, partner base, and presence in Japan. Cloudflare expanded its network in Japan in 2010, just months after launching. Now, 12 years later, Cloudflare is continuing its mission to help build a better Internet in Japan and across the globe, and I’m looking forward to being able to contribute to that mission!

In my 35-year career in the IT industry, I have been fortunate enough to work with some of the biggest technology companies in the world, working in various roles in both sales and technical sides of the business. I consider this one of my biggest strengths. In addition, working in the IT industry has allowed me to acquire industry knowledge across a number of different solutions such as custom development, packaged systems (ERP, CRM), MS Office products, and cloud solutions.

Most recently, I was director of the Enterprise Business Group for Japan at AWS, where I was responsible for all commercial industries such as Manufacturing, Process, Distribution, Retail, Telecommunications, Utility, Media, Service, Pharmaceuticals, among others. Prior to AWS, I was Microsoft's Managing Executive Officer in charge of the Public Sector. In this role, I managed business and strategic relationships with the central government and local government, as well as the healthcare, pharmaceutical, and education industries to help customers accelerate their digital transformation, especially when it comes to their shift to the cloud. In 2005, I joined SAP Japan and spent eight years establishing the partner ecosystem, managing about 250 partners. My last role in SAP was to drive business as a sales leader for three industries (public, utility, and telecommunication). In 1999, I joined IBM to be an initial member of the ERP business unit. At IBM, I got the opportunity to manage large ERP implementations as a Senior Project Manager.

If I look back on my career, I experienced so many things from many dimensions. I started my career as an engineer after I graduated from university. It was the first time I learned what a computer was. I enjoyed my first job as a programmer. I remember how it was a great time for me to learn new things every day since technology was rapidly changing, even in the old days, many, many years ago. I am proud that I have always kept the engineering spirit even after I moved to a sales and management position. After two years as a programmer, I moved to Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) and spent 12 years as a Systems Engineer. At that time, DEC decided to establish a new manufacturing facility in Japan to provide better quality for Japanese customers. My mission was to design, develop, and maintain all the application systems required to ensure a smooth and seamless manufacturing process, including master production schedule, manufacturing resource planning, inventory, purchasing, work order, shop floor control, and finally developed an automated warehousing system. My last job in DEC was to implement SAP R/3 as a Japan implementation manager. The Japan implementation team was part of the global SAP implementation project, giving me the opportunity to work in a multinational environment. I really enjoyed working at DEC. It was a truly excellent experience for me.

As I look back on my career, one of the things I consider my strength is that throughout those years I got to experience working on technology and computers — as a customer, as a partner, and as a salesperson. Now 35 years later, I'm finally convinced that my role in a global IT company is to contribute to the digital transformation of our customers as well as the society as a whole in Japan, by being able to share global best practices. I decided to join Cloudflare to help accelerate the digital transformation that will help improve Japan’s competitiveness in the world. I believe we have a lot of opportunities to help companies in Japan in this transformation. I remember the feeling I had when I started my first-ever job. I felt a thrill and great motivation. I have the same feeling now with this excellent opportunity for me to launch my new journey with Cloudflare.

It's often been said that Japan has been slow to adopt digital models, compared to the United States, Europe, and even some countries in Asia. In order to accelerate this digital transformation, the Japanese Government launched a new policy called “Cloud By Default” and subsequently established a Digital Agency in September 2021. There is so much to do, and we are behind. The shift to the cloud has just begun. Businesses are starting to move from on-premise to the cloud, and many organizations are selecting a multi-cloud environment as the next generation platform. Cloudflare has the right solutions, the right people and the right strategy to help Japanese organizations make that shift.

Cloudflare is in a unique position to transform the way we do business by providing security, enhancing the performance of business-critical applications, and eliminating the cost and complexity of managing individual hardware, all within a global cloud platform. Cloudflare’s vast global network, which is one of the fastest on the planet, is trusted by millions of web properties. With direct connections to nearly every service and cloud provider, the Cloudflare network can reach 95% of the world’s population within 50 ms. Cloudflare already has 250 data centers including two Japan sites, Tokyo and Osaka.

Cloudflare is ready to help customers in Japan accelerate their digital transformation and be a trusted solution provider for the Japanese market. I am very much looking forward to contributing to the growth of the business, and the acceleration of the digital transformation for businesses in Japan.

I am excited to announce that I have joined Cloudflare as the Head of Southeast Asia and Korea (SEAK) region to help build a better Internet and to expand Cloudflare’s growing customer, partner and local teams across all the countries in SEAK. Cloudflare is at an emergence phase in this region, with immense growth potential, and this is just the beginning. Cloudflare has had a lot of success globally and our charter is to build on that success and momentum to grow our presence locally to address the demands in Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, Indonesia, Philippines, Indochina and Korea. Customer engagements in each of the countries in SEAK presents a unique, rich and fulfilling engagement each with their own intricacies.

I was born in India (Surat, Gujarat), and at the age of four our family moved to Bahrain where we lived for eight years. We then moved to New Zealand, which is where I completed my senior years of high school and also my Bachelor’s Degree in Information Engineering at Massey University. After graduation, we moved to Melbourne, Australia which is our family home and where my career started.

I love meeting and working with diverse and interesting people who bring different views, thoughts and perspectives. The experiences growing up and working in so many countries has made me a more dynamic leader, while working with so many cultures and diverse teams. Diversity is what drives innovation and growth, more so true than ever in this exciting region.

I love my sports (cricket, squash, golf), traveling and spending time with family & friends.

I joined IBM Australia as a graduate in 1997, gaining valuable experiences across many roles from delivery to sales, in a career spanning 15 years. Having been in the IT industry for more than 27 years, career experiences at large global organisations like IBM, SAP, Cisco, NTT and Oracle, all of these amazing organisations and colleagues (many of whom are friends), have provided me with the best set of tools and experiences which I can bring to Cloudflare to help drive the growth agenda.

Below are the main reasons I joined Cloudflare to embark on this amazing journey:

1. Cloudflare’s Growth potential: Cloudflare has an immense growth potential in APJC and subsequently in Southeast Asia & Korea.  In our recently announced Q3 earnings, we reported a 51% year-over-year increase in revenue, with a record addition of 170 large customers.

2. Cloudflare’s ever-growing Portfolio: I was lucky enough to join during Birthday Week, Cloudflare’s 11th birthday. Many new products and solutions were announced during the week to further enhance our growing portfolio of solutions. I am amazed at the pace of innovation, where Cloudflare is continuously releasing new products and features on the Cloud that are then instantly available at all our data centers globally for our clients to consume and adopt.

3. Cloudflare People: During the interview process, I met with 11 Cloudflare colleagues, and all of these felt more like a discussion with a two-way dialogue and a view for Cloudflare to get to know me better, and for me to better understand Cloudflare. This emphasised in my mind the like-minded people I will be working with, where we all work collaboratively, leveraging the experiences we all bring from our past to achieve greater outcomes.

4. Cloudflare Culture: having now met with so many of my colleagues at Cloudflare, the one thing that stands out for me is the humility with which everyone operates from Global and Regional leaders to our local teams. The all-inclusive culture at Cloudflare along with the three tenets of Curious, Transparent and Principled are very much aligned with my personal principles: Honesty, Integrity and Transparency.

It is an exciting time to be joining one the fastest growing Cloud companies in the world and I want to be part of the Cloudflare journey and contribute to the growth agenda.

I am convinced that Cloudflare is and will be an even bigger global IT giant. Cloudflare’s mission is to help build a better Internet, by working collaboratively with our customers to make them more secure, providing a high level of performance to support their business critical applications, while reducing cost and the complexity of managing their network infrastructure.

The Southeast Asia and Korea region is such a diverse, dynamic and exciting region to be in, where the potential for growth is limitless. As many as 40 million people in six countries across the region — Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, the Philippines, Vietnam and Thailand — came online for the first time in 2020. That pushed the total number of internet users in Southeast Asia to 400 million with some of the biggest ecommerce markets in the world.

Similarly, Korea has the highest internet penetration rate with 96% of its population online. On top of that, the government is investing heavily in its Digital New Deal program, which will focus on development of technologies based on data, networks and AI, as well as a digitization plan that will create job opportunities in a number of industries across the country.

Cloudflare is in a unique position to transform the way business is conducted in this region with its global cloud platform that delivers a broad range of network and security services to businesses of all sizes across all geographies. Coverage across Large Enterprises, Public Sector, Mid-Market, Start-ups to the individual developer: companies of all sizes across all industries are being powered by Cloudflare to provide Security, Performance, and Reliability services.

If you are interested in joining Cloudflare and helping to build a more secure, fast, and reliable Internet, do explore our open roles. We are hiring talented people locally, building and strengthening our local teams across: Strategic / Account Executives, Channel Managers, Business Development Representatives, Strategic / Solution Engineers, Customer Success Managers and more.

It is a great honour and a privilege for me to be part of the Cloudflare family to help build Cloudflare’s future in Southeast Asia and Korea. The potential opportunity is enormous, and we are just getting started.

Feel free to reach out to me at satyen@cloudflare.com.

I’m excited to announce that on March 1, I joined Cloudflare as Vice President and GM, Asia Pacific (including Japan and Greater China) to help build and expand Cloudflare’s growing customer and partner base and presence in the region. We currently have over 200 passionate and customer-focused employees in APAC, with offices in Beijing, Singapore, Sydney and Tokyo.

Singapore is where I’m based. Melbourne is home with my early years spent in Country Victoria. I love the outdoors, sports, travelling and spending time with family and friends. I am naturally intrigued by interesting people and different perspectives. I have a thirst for learning and understanding why people act and behave the way they do, and believe that understanding more about different cultures makes me a better person/leader. And what better way to do so than by being in the most diverse region in the world — Asia Pacific is home to 60% of the world’s population, with thousands of languages spoken, spanning multiple time zones. With the rise of innovation and technology adoption in the region, growth and expansion opportunities are endless.

Throughout my 20-year career, I have been extremely fortunate to work for companies that were instrumental in technological transformations, which have made a huge impact on the way we do business and everyday life. From IBM to Cisco to Amazon Web Services, these companies have pioneered innovations that transformed legacy systems, processes, and ways of working into intuitive platforms that enable scale, cost efficiencies, collaboration, and connectivity everywhere.

This brings me to Cloudflare. Cloudflare’s mission is to help build a better Internet. The Internet is the lifeblood of business and the primary vehicle of commerce and communication for people around the world. While it was brilliantly architected, it was not designed to deliver the security, performance, and reliability required for businesses today. For decades, a number of vendors built a range of standalone hardware boxes to address the emerging requirements for security, performance, and reliability. These boxes could be deployed in on-prem data centers to deliver functions and to alleviate some of the Internet’s fundamental security, performance, and reliability problems. And then, the cloud happened.

Organizations now exist in a complex infrastructure environment that highlights the Internet’s fundamental problems more than ever. The on-prem boxes that they once relied upon to solve these problems were never designed to work in such an environment. As a result, a major architectural shift at the network layer is now underway, and Cloudflare is leading this transition. Cloudflare is well-positioned to transform the way we do business by providing security, enhancing the performance of business-critical applications, and eliminating the cost and complexity of managing individual network hardware, all within a global cloud platform.

Asia Pacific currently has the largest number of Internet users globally, with more than 53 percent of its population now online. What’s more, the coronavirus pandemic has only reinforced what was already an upward trend — e-commerce — with about 75 percent of global retail growth coming from the region. The rise in Internet traffic also means an increase in online threats that are becoming highly sophisticated, automated, and distributed. Unfortunately, cyber threats do not just impact retailers. All other industries, from manufacturing, healthcare, financial services, government, are not excluded. With business moving more and more to the cloud, organizations now require network and security capabilities that will allow them to be agile, nimble, and secure at any given time. This is where Cloudflare can help.

I’m really excited to work with our customers in APAC and talk about all of Cloudflare’s capabilities, because I truly believe that our products and solutions will make a huge impact in the region. As I begin this role, my priorities are around building a diverse and entrepreneurial team, generating brand visibility, and creating strategic customer relationships enabled by a vibrant partner ecosystem with a strong customer focus. I hope to build a team that is passionate about our customers and their success. We have a tremendous opportunity to create pockets of innovation with our customers, leveraging learnings, not only from our global counterparts but also from within the region. The best part? We’re just getting started!

Please join us for an exclusive gathering to discover the latest in cloud solutions for Internet Security and Performance.

Thursday, 6 June, 2019:  15:30 - 20:00

Location: the Oberoi (37-39, MG Road, Yellappa Garden, Yellappa Chetty Layout, Sivanchetti Gardens, Bengalore)

We will discuss the newest security trends and introduce serverless solutions.

We have invited renowned leaders across industries, including big brands and some of the fastest-growing startups. You will  learn the insider strategies and tactics that will help you to protect your business, to accelerate the performance and to identify the quick-wins in a complex internet environment.

Speakers:

• Vaidik Kapoor, Head of Engineering, Grofers

• Nithyanand Mehta, VP of Technical Services & GM India, Catchpoint

• Viraj Patel, VP of Technology, Bookmyshow

• Kailash Nadh, CTO, Zerodha

• Trey Guinn, Global Head of Solution Engineering, Cloudflare

Agenda:

15:30 - 16:00 - Registration and Refreshment

16:00 - 16:30 - DDoS Landscapes and Security Trends

16:30 - 17:15 - Workers Overview and Demo

17:15 - 18:00 - Panel Discussion - Best Practice on Successful Cyber Security and Performance Strategy

18:00 - 18:30 - Keynote #1 - Future edge computing

18:30 - 19:00 -  Keynote # 2 - Cyber attacks are evolving, so should you: How to adopt a quick-win security policy

19:00 - 20:00 - Happy Hour

View Event Details & Register Here »

We look forward to meeting you there!

When I started, I spoke about growing our brand recognition in Asia and optimizing our reach to clients by building up teams and channel partners. I also mentioned a key reason behind my joining was Cloudflare’s mission to help build a better Internet and focus on democratizing Internet tools that were once only available to large companies. I’m delighted to share that we’ve made great progress and are in a strong position to continue our rapid growth. It’s been a wonderful year, and I’m thrilled that I joined the company.

There has been a lot going on in our business, as well as in the region. Let’s start with Cloudflare Asia.

Our Singapore team has swelled from 40 people from 11 countries to almost 100 people from 19 nations. Our team is as diverse as our client base and keeps the office lively and innovative.

The Cloudflare Singapore Team

The number of Asian businesses choosing to work with us has more than doubled. You can check out what we’ve been doing with companies like Carousell, Vicroads, and 9GAG. Our relationships span all across the region, from India to Japan, from small business to large organizations, from startups to governments, and a wide variety of verticals from e-commerce to financial services.

To further expand our reach, we signed eight new partners representing seven markets and are in discussion with select others. We even held our first partner enablement bootcamp recently which was a big success.

Our First Partner Bootcamp in Asia

We moved into a larger and wonderful office in Singapore. Customers can come to Frasers Tower to see our Network Operations Center and stunning view of the city. We celebrated this new office and Asian Headquarters opening with two events where our co-founder and COO, Michelle Zatlyn presided. Dignitaries from the Singapore Economic Development Board, Singapore Cyber Security Association and the American Embassy cut the ribbon, and hundreds of customers, partners and friends joined us to kick off the Lunar New Year.

Celebrating our new office opening in Feb 2019

We have a wonderful community space that we are sharing for meet-ups. Developers, interest groups, and others from the community are welcome to use it. The first group to take advantage of this was IndoTech, a community of Indonesian professionals living in Singapore, who work in tech.

IndoTech meetup at the Cloudflare events space 

Asia is a large region and we are thrilled to expand to Australia. We have many local customers like AfterpayTouch, Fitness and Lifestyle Group, and the NIB group. We have run Worker focused meetups in Sydney and Melbourne as part of our Real World Serverless roadshow and shared what we learned about Noise on the Internet with 1.1.1.1 at AusNOG and NZNog. Today, we are announcing our expanded Australia presence. Incorporating into a new country is a big step and we’ve taken it. This is a good time to mention that we are hiring. If you want to join Cloudflare in Sydney, please get in touch.

Cloudflare has 165 data centers around the world. Since I’ve joined a year ago, we’ve added 46 cities globally, including 15 in APAC. We now have data centers in Pakistan and Vietnam. Around 20% of Cloudflare’s globally distributed network is in Asia.

We’ve added a number of great products, which can be found on our blog. Some additions that are especially pertinent to the region include adding UDP capability to Spectrum. Gaming clients typically use custom protocols based on UDP, which legacy systems don’t effectively protect. So our expansion of Spectrum has been eagerly received by the many mobile game developers across the region. Indeed, gamers have been using Spectrum even prior to this launch. One example is a mobile game producer where we protect their login/authentication servers that are TCP-based to mitigate DDoS attacks for the purpose of keeping their servers online for players to be able to log in and play.

The world is moving to serverless computing and Cloudflare is leading the way. Many of the companies in APAC are on the forefront of this trend and are leveraging Cloudflare to improve their infrastructure. One client is using Cloudflare Workers to speed up and improve capture rates of their analytics engine.

From a regional perspective, many countries in Asia are encouraging businesses to be digital-ready.  Governments around the region are spearheading programs to help SMEs (small and medium-sized enterprises), corporations and government departments take advantage of technology and innovation to capture economic gains. For example, Singapore announced SMEsGoDigital as part of the 2017 budget and Thailand recently launched the Thailand 4.0 initiative.

In addition, one interesting aspect of the Asian market is that a higher percentage of companies are using multi-cloud architecture. Whether it’s because these  companies need to cover different countries where one of the large cloud providers (eg AWS, Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure, Alicloud or IBM) is stronger than others, or because companies want to avoid “vendor lock-in”, many companies end up using several cloud compute partners.

Needless to say, it has been an exciting year. I am proud of what we have accomplished and looking forward to what we have left to do.

Given all this opportunity for growth, our team in Singapore is hiring! We have roles in Systems Reliability Engineering, Network Engineering, Technical Support Engineering, Solutions Engineering, Customer Success Engineering, Recruiting, Account Executives, Business Development Representatives, Sales Operations, Business Operations, and beyond. Check out our careers page.

Ulaanbaatar (or Ulan Bator; but shortened to UB by many) is the capital of Mongolia and located nearly a mile above sea level just outside the Gobi Desert - a desert that spans a good percentage of Central Asia’s Mongolia. (The rest of the Gobi Desert extends into China). The country is nestled squarely between Russia to the north and China to the south. It’s also home to some of the richest and ancient customs and festivals around. It’s those festivals that successfully draw in the tourists who want to experience something quite unique. Luckily, even with all the tourists, Mongolia has managed to keep its local customs; both in the cities and within its nomadic tribes.

via Wikipedia

History also has drawn explorers and conquerors to and from the region; but more on that later.

Any avid reader of our blogs will know that we frequently explain that the expansion of our network provides customers and end-users with both more capacity and less latency. That goal (covering 95% of the Internet population with 10 milliseconds or less of latency) means that Mongolia was seriously on our radar.

Now we have a data center in Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia, latency into that blue sky country is significantly reduced. Prior to this data center going live we were shipping bits into the country via Hong Kong, a whopping 1,800 miles away (or 50 milliseconds if we talk latency). That's far! We know this new data center is a win-win for both mobile and broadband customers within the country and for Cloudflare customers as a whole.

Ulaanbaatar is city number 154 on Cloudflare’s network. Our expansion into cities like Ulaanbaatar doesn’t just happen instantly; it takes many teams within Cloudflare in order to successfully deploy in a place like this.

However, before deploying, we need to negotiate a place to deploy into. A new city requires a secure data center for us to build into. A bandwidth partner is also required. We need to get access to the local networks and to also acquire cache-fill bandwidth in order to operate our CDN. Once we have those items negotiated, we can focus on the next steps. Any site we build has to match our own stringent security standards (we are PCI/DSS compliant – hence all our data centers need to also be PCI/DSS compliant). That’s a paperwork process, which surprisingly takes longer than most other stages (because we care about security).

Then logistics kicks in. A BOM (Bill of Materials) is created. Serial numbers recorded. Power plugs chosen. Fun fact: Cloudflare data centers are nearly all identical, except the power cables. While we live in a world where fiber optic cables and connectors are universal, independent of location (or speed in some cases), the power connections we receive for our data centers vary widely as we expand around the globe.

The actual shipping is possibly the more interesting part of the logistics process. Getting a few pallets of hardware strapped up and ready to move is only a small part of the process. Paperwork again becomes the all-powerful issue. Each country has its own customs and import process, each shipping company has its own twist on how to process things, and each shipment needs to be coordinated with a receiving party. Our logistics team pulls off this miracle for new sites, upgrades for existing sites, replacement parts for existing sites, all while sometimes calmly listening to mundane on-hold music from around the globe.

Then our hardware arrives! Seriously, this is a biggie and those around the office that follow these new city builds are always celebrating on those days. The logistics team has done their part; now it’s time for the deployment team to kick-in.

The deployment team’s main goal is to get hardware racked-and-stacked in a site where (in most cases) we are contracting out the remote-hands to do this work. Sometimes we send people to a site to build it; however, that’s not a scalable process and hence we use local remote-hands contractors to do this heavy-lifting and cabling. There are diagrams, there are instructions, there are color-coded cables (‘cause the right cable needs to go into the right socket). Depending on the size of the build; it can be just a days work or up-to a weeks worth of work. We vary our data center sizes based on the capacity needs for each city. Once racked-and-stacked there is one more job to get done within the Infrastructure team. They get the initial private network connection enabled and secured. That single connection provides us with the ability to continue to the next step. Actually setting up the network and servers at the new site.

Every new data center site is shipped with zero configuration loaded into network hardware and compute servers. They all ship raw with no Cloudflare knowledge embedded into them. This is by design. The network teams first goal is to configure the routers and switches, which is mainly a bootstrap process in order for the hardware to phone-home and securely request its full configuration setup. We have previously written about our extensive network automation methods. In the case of a new site, it’s not that different. Once the site can communicate back home, it’s clear to the software base that its configuration is out of date. Updates are pushed to the site and network monitoring is automatically enabled.

But let's not paint a perfect rosy picture. There can still be networking issues. Just one is worth pointing-out as it’s a recurring issue and one that plagues the industry globally. Fiber optic cables can sometimes be plugged in with their receive and transmit sides reversed. It’s a 50:50 chance of being right. Sometimes it just amazes us that we can’t get this fixed; but … a quick swap of the two connectors and we are back in business!

No conversation about Mongolia would be valid unless we discuss Genghis Khan. Back in the 13th century, Genghis Khan founded the Mongol Empire. He unified the tribes of what is now Mongolia (and beyond). He established the largest land empire in history and is well described both online and via various TV documentaries (The History Channel doesn’t skimp when it comes to covering him). Genghis Khan was a name of honor that he didn’t receive till 1206. Before that he was just named “Temujin”.

Photo by SarahTz CC by/2.0

Around 30 miles outside Ulaanbaatar is the equestrian statue of Genghis Khan on the banks of the Tuul River in Gorkhi Terelj National Park. Pictured above, this statue is 131 feet tall and built from 250 tons of steel.

We get to announce our new city (and country) data center during a very special time. The Golden Eagle Festival takes place during the first weekend of October (that’s October 6 and 7 this year). It’s a test of a hunter’s speed and agility. In this case the hunters (nomads of Mongolia) are practicing an ancient technique of using Golden Eagles to hunt. It takes place in the far west of the country in the Altai Mountains.

The most famous festival in Mongolia is the Naadam Festival in mid-July. So many things going on within that festival, all of which is a celebration of Mongolian and nomadic culture. The festival celebrates the local sports (wrestling, archery, and horse racing) along with plenty of arts. The opening ceremony can be quite elaborate.

When discussing Mongolia, travelers nearly always want to make sure their itineraries overlap at least one of these festivals!

Last week was Cloudflare’s Birthday Week and we announced many services and products. Rest-assured that everything we announced is instantly available in Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia (data center city 154) just like it’s available everywhere else on Cloudflare’s network.

One final trivia point regarding our Ulaanbaatar data center. With Ulaanbaatar live, we now have datacenters covering the letters A thru Z (from Amsterdam to Zurich), i.e. with U added, every letter is now fully represented.

If you like what you’ve read and want to come join our infrastructure team, our logistics team, our network team, our SRE team, or any of the teams that help with these global expansions, then we would love to see your resume or CV. Look here for job opening.

Our newest data center is now live in Tel Aviv, Israel! This expands our global network even further to span 135 cities across 68 countries.

Although Israel will only be turning 70 this year, it has a history so rich we’ll leave it to the textbooks. Despite its small size, and young age, Israel is home to one of the largest tech scenes, often referred to as Start-up Nation.

Haifa’s Matam technology park houses a few tech giants’ offices including Intel, Apple, Elbit, Google, IBM, Microsoft, Yahoo, Philips and more. Meanwhile, Tel Aviv serves a true hipster capital, with a high concentration of great coffee shops to serve its many startup employees and founders.

Some brag-worthy Israeli inventions include flash drives, Waze and cherry tomatoes. This is due to Israel’s excellent education. Israel is home of the top universities in the world, bringing Israel to be one of the top five nations in scientific publication per capita output. Israel also has one of the highest PhD and MD degrees per capita, and among of the highest nobel laureates per capita as well. Israeli mothers, your nagging has paid off.

CC BY-SA 4.0 image by Rita Kozlov (the author)

Native born Israelis are nicknamed “Sabras”, after a cactus fruit: prickly on the outside, soft and sweet on the inside. Indeed, if you find yourself wandering the markets in Israel, or waiting in line for a falafel, you will hear much shouting and bargaining. However, once an Israeli has let you into their home, you will find yourself met with warm hospitality.

Next week, we'll announce additional deployments to help make the Internet even faster.

This map reflects the network as of the publish date of this blog post. For the most up to date directory of locations please refer to our Network Map on the Cloudflare site.

Cloudflare is excited to turn up our newest data center in Istanbul, Turkey. This is our 124th data center globally (and 62nd country), and it is throwing a curveball in our data center by continent tracking. Istanbul is one of the only cities in the world to span two continents: Europe and Asia. Technically, we’ll specify this is our 34th data center in Europe. In the coming weeks, we’ll continue to attract more traffic to this deployment as more networks interconnect with us locally.

March 2018 is a big month for us, as we’ll be announcing (on average) nearly one new Cloudflare data center per day. Stay tuned as we continue to meaningfully expand our geographic coverage and capacity.

The Hagia Sophia - Photo by Blaque X / Unsplash

Istanbul itself is home to more than 16 million people, and Turkey is home to over 80 million people. For reference, Turkey’s population is comparable to Germany’s, where Cloudflare turned up its 11th, 31st, 44th, 72nd and 110th data centers in Frankfurt, Düsseldorf, Berlin, Hamburg and Munich. Internet usage in Turkey is approaching 70%, while the rate of Turkish households with access to Internet now exceeds 80% with a majority of households relying on mobile broadband connection. With its dense population and historical prominence on Silk Road, Istanbul has a history of leading the way in commerce. Today, Turkey has one of the youngest populations in Europe, fueling early massive adoption in social media and e-commerce, especially in dense urban areas.

From one great empire to the next - we’ll head from Istanbul, home of the Ottoman Empire, formerly Constantinople, capital of the Roman Empire, to the land of the Vikings for our 125th data center. (As for the data centers previewed as “south of the equator”, they come in pairs, and we’ll announce them very soon)

We said that we would head to the mountains for Cloudflare’s 123rd data center, and mountains feature prominently as we talk about Kathmandu, Nepal, home of our newest deployment and our 42nd data center in Asia!

Five and three quarter key facts to get started:

• Nepal is home to the highest mountain in the world.

• Kathmandu has more UNESCO heritage sites in its immediate area than any other capital!

• The Nepalese flag isn’t a rectangle. It’s not even close!

• Nepal has never been conquered or ruled by another country.

• Kathmandu, Nepal is where Cloudflare has placed its 123rd data center.

• Nepal’s timezone is 5 hours 45 minutes ahead of GMT.

The mountainous nation of Nepal is home to Mount Everest, the highest mountain in the world, known in Nepali as Sagarmāthā. Most of us learn that at school; however there’s plenty of other mountains located in Nepal. Here’s the ones above 8,000 meters (extracted from the full list) to get you started:

• Mount Everest at 8,848 meters

• Kanchenjunga at 8,586 meters

• Lhotse at 8,516 meters

• Makalu at 8,463 meters

• Cho Oyu at 8,201 meters

• Dhaulagiri I at 8,167 meters

• Manaslu at 8,156 meters

• Annapurna I at 8,091 meters

Photo of Annapurna taken outside Pokhara by blog author

As we said, Kathmandu and Nepal are very mountainous region! Some of these mountains are shared with neighboring countries. In-fact, the whole Himalayan range stretches much further than just Nepal as it also encompasses neighboring countries such as Bhutan, China, India, and Pakistan.

The official flag of Nepal is not a rectangle, it’s a very unique shape. No other flag comes close to having this shape. At first viewing it looks simple, just two triangles (representing the Himalayas) placed vertically against the flagpole. Nope - the triangles have a very specific dimension.

The flags symbolism goes beyond the mountains. The two white symbols represent the calming moon and fierce sun or sometimes the cool weather in the Himalayas and warm lowlands.

But back to those two triangles. Ignoring the old adage ("It was my understanding that there would be no math."), let’s grab what Wikipedia says about the shape of this flag and see if we can follow along.

First off, let’s explain irrational vs rational numbers (or ratios or fractions). A rational number is a simple P/Q number like 1/2 or 3/4 or 1/5 or even 16/9 etc etc. The numerator and denominator must both be integers. Even 100003/999983 (using prime numbers) is a rational number. If the denominator is 0 then the number isn’t rational.

An irrational number is everything else. If it can’t be written as P/Q, then it’s irrational. This means a number that doesn’t terminate or doesn’t become periodic. For example, π or Pi (3.141592653589793238462…), e or Euler's Number (2.718281828459045235360…), the square root of 2 (1.414213562373095…), etc. These are all irrational numbers. Don’t be fooled by 4/3. While it’s impossible to full write out (1.33333… continuing forever), yet it’s actually a rational number.

(Read up about Hippasus, who’s credited with discovering the existence of irrational numbers, if you want an irrational murder story!)

That’s enough math theory; now back to the Nepali flag. Each red triangle has a rational ratio. The flag is started with simple 1:1 and 3:4 ratios and that’s the easy part. We are all capable of grabbing paper or cloth and make a rectangle that’s 3 inches by 4 inches, or 1.5 meters by 2 meters or any 3:4 ratio. It’s simple math. What gets complicated is adding the blue border. For that, we need to read-up what was said by the On-Line Encyclopedia of Integer Sequences (OEIS Foundation) and Wikipedia. They both go into great depth to describe the full mathematical dimensions of the flag. Let’s just paraphrase them slightly:

However the math (and geometry) award goes to the work done in order to produce "Calculation of the aspect ratio of the national flag of Nepal". The final geometric drawing is this:

Berechnung des Seitenverhältnisses der Nationalfahne von Nepal

Yeah - that’s going a bit too far for a Cloudflare blog! Let’s just say that Nepal’s flag is unique and quite interesting.

We are especially excited to announce our Kathmandu data center while attending APRICOT conference, being held in Nepal this year. The event, supported by APNIC, the local Regional Internet address Registry (RIR) for the Asia-Pacific region, attracts leaders from Internet industry technical, operational, and policy-making communities. Cloudflare's favorite part of APRICOT is the Peering Forum track on Monday.

Nepal is just one of eight countries making up the SAARC (South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation) organization. Headquartered in Kathmandu, it comprises Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, Nepal, the Maldives, Pakistan and Sri Lanka.

Cloudflare has already deployed into neighboring India, and any astute reader of these blogs will know we are always working on adding sites where and when we can. The SAARC countries are in our focus.

For Cloudflare‘s next two data centers, we head to a different continent and way-south of the equator. Throughout 2018, we’ll announce a stream of deployments across many different cities that each improve the security and performance of millions of our customers.

If you’re motivated by the idea of helping build one of the world's largest networks, come join our team!

Cloudflare is excited to turn up our newest data center in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, making over 7 million Internet properties even faster. This is our 122nd data center globally, and our 41st data center in Asia. By the end of 2018, we expect that 95% of the world's population will live in a country with a Cloudflare data center, as we grow our global network to span 200 cities.

Home to over 16 million people, Cambodia has a relatively low base of Internet penetration (~25%) today, but is seeing an increasing number of Internet users coming online. For perspective, Cambodia has approximately the same number of Internet users as Lebanon (where we just turned up our 121st data center!) or Singapore (from where we used to serve a portion of Cambodian visitors).

Photo by Florian Hahn / Unsplash

In the coming weeks, we’ll further optimize our routing for Cloudflare customers and expect to see a growing number of ISPs pick up our customers’ traffic on a low latency path.

Latency from a Cambodian ISP (SINET) to Cloudflare customers decreases 10x

Next up, in fact, thousands of feet further up, we head to the mountains for Cloudflare’s 123rd data center. Following that, two upcoming Cloudflare data centers are located well south of the Equator, and a continent away.

I’m a Californian with more than 20 years of experience growing businesses across Asia. I initially came to Asia with the Boston Consulting Group and since then I’ve helped Google and Twitter start and grow their businesses in Singapore and Asia. In many cases throughout my career, I’ve been one of the very first employees (sometimes the first) on the ground in this part of the world. To me, the Asian market presents an often untapped opportunity for companies looking to expand, and it’s a challenge that has appealed to me throughout my career.

This year's Chinese New Year celebration

I’m driven by opportunities to work with global businesses that drive change and are full of ambitious and passionate people. Cloudflare’s mission is to help build a better Internet and the company is focused on democratizing Internet tools that were once only available to large companies. Making security and speed, which are necessary for any strong business, available to anyone with an Internet property, is truly a noble goal. That’s one of the reasons I’m most excited to work with Cloudflare.

Cloudflare is also serious about culture and diversity, an area that’s very important to me. When I was considering joining Cloudflare, I watched videos from the Internet Summit, an annual event that Cloudflare hosts in its San Francisco office (we will be hosting a London version as well this year). One thing that really stood out for me is that nearly half of the speakers were women and all of the speakers came from different backgrounds. The topics could have been covered by a much more homogeneous group of men, but Cloudflare went the extra mile to make sure more diverse perspectives were represented. I’m extremely passionate about encouraging women to pursue opportunities in business and tech so watching so many women give insightful talks made me realize that this was a company I wanted to work for.

Now for a little about our work in the region. Cloudflare’s Singapore office opened more than two years ago and has more than 40 employees. Employees here hail from 16 countries and I’m proud to say that the Singapore office has the highest percentage of women.

Functions in Asia include, Solutions Engineering, Site Reliability Engineering, Network Operations, Recruiting, Product Development, Operations, Customer Success, and Technical Support. Our team here has made significant contributions in building Cloudflare’s performance and security products, features, and capabilities.

Celebrating Cloudflare's 7th birthday in Singapore

The Singapore team has also had great success serving Cloudflare’s regional customers. We have enterprise customers across all of Asia and across all verticals.

Much of the success in the Singapore office can be attributed to so much effort from all of our pioneering team, especially our first three employees in Singapore: Jimmy, Frankie, and Mark. I’d also like to call out Colin, head of our Sales team in Asia, James, our Solutions Engineering lead in Asia, and Grace Lin, who founded and led our Singapore office for the past two years, commuting back and forth from San Francisco to manage the office. I thank them for all of their hard work in growing Cloudflare’s presence in Asia and I’m excited to work alongside them in this next stage of growth.

I’m truly looking forward to helping Cloudflare grow its reach over the next five years.

If you’re interested in exploring careers at Cloudflare, we are hiring globally! Our team in Singapore is looking to expand across the region for roles in Systems Reliability Engineering, Network Engineering, Technical Support Engineering, Solutions Engineering, Customer Success Engineering, Recruiting, Account Executives, Business Development Representatives, Sales Operations, Business Operations, and more. Check out our careers page to learn more!

Most of the island was hit with power outages, shortages and rolling blackouts, with street lights not functioning, nor power in many of Taipei’s shopping malls, and much other infrastructure.

Blackouts of this scale are very rare. Usually, during an outage of this scale, it would be expected that Internet traffic would greatly drop, as houses and businesses lose power and are unable to connect to the Internet. I’ve experienced this in the past, working at consumer ISPs. As households and businesses lose power, so do their modems or routers which connect them to the Internet.

However, during yesterday's outage, something different happened. I'd like to share some insights from yesterday's outage.

Photo: Taipei 101 Dark during the Blackout -Source: David Chang/EPA

Most Telecom and Data Center facilities are built with redundancy in mind and have backup power generation. Our Data Center partner, Chief, was able to switch to backup power generation without any service interruption, allowing our service to operate without interruption.

The lack of interruption was also reflected by many users still accessing the Internet. From our statistics, the number of requests didn’t drop, as illustrated by the graph following. At the beginning of the power outage, there was actually a spike in requests, as more people likely look on the Internet as to more details of what's happening. The graph below shows a timeline of requests per second, seen in our Taipei data center, with a red line marking the beginning of the power outage.

Breaking down traffic between Mobile and Desktop clients, approximately 10% of clients shifted from Desktop to Mobile devices at the beginning of the outage. The graph also shows a spike daily around lunch time, as many clients shift to their mobile phones during lunch.

The shift to to mobile devices did however cause a drop in bandwidth used, by approximately 25%. The following graph showing our bandwidth usage to HiNet, the largest ISP, demonstrates this sharp drop.

Power was fully restored around 21:40pm, (13:40 UTC), however many users were able to regain access during power-rationing and Internet usage grew to reach its usual night-time peaks.

This power outage taught us that Internet usage does not necessarily decrease during a power outage in 2017. Number of requests can actually increase, but bandwidth usage drops, reflecting a shift to usage of mobile devices.

Whilst the entire city lived in darkness, the Internet shined bright!

We are excited to add four new data centers this week to Cloudflare's growing network, beginning with Colombo, Sri Lanka. This deployment is our 112th data center globally, and our 38th in Asia.

_CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 image by Pavel Dobrovsky_

Six million Internet properties using Cloudflare are now even faster across the island country of Sri Lanka. Previously, local visitors to Cloudflare customers were served out of our Singapore or Dubai data centers.

Latency (ms) decreases 4x to Cloudflare customers. Source: Cedexis

Sri Lanka added over one million Internet users in the past year alone. At ~30% Internet penetration, there is considerable room to grow.

Our deployments to be revealed later this week will provide additional redundancy to existing facilities in North America and Africa.

If you enjoy the idea of helping build one of the world's largest networks, come join our team!

CC-BY 2.0 image by Marco Polo

In the coming days, Cloudflare will be announcing a series of new data centers across five continents. We begin with Yerevan, the capital and largest city of Armenia, the mountainous country in the South Caucasus. This deployment is our 37th data center in Asia, and 103rd data center globally.

CC-BY 2.0 image by PAN Photo

Yerevan, one of the oldest continuously inhabited cities in the world, has a rich history going back all the way to 782 BC. Famous for its cognac, lavash flatbread, and beautiful medieval churches, Armenia is also home to more chess grandmasters per capita than most countries!

Latency (ms) decreases 6x for UCOM Internet user in Yerevan to Cloudflare. Source: Cedexis

The newest Cloudflare deployment will make 6 million Internet properties faster and more secure, as we serve traffic to Yerevan and adjoining countries.

If the Cloudflare datacenter closest to the Equator (to date) was Singapore, the next deployment brings us even closer. Which one do you think it is?

The Cloudflare network today

－ The Cloudflare Team

Almost as soon as Dyn came under attack we noticed a sudden jump in DNS errors on our edge machines and alerted our SRE and support teams that Dyn was in trouble. Support was ready to help joint customers and we began looking in detail at the effect the Dyn outage was having on our systems.

An immediate concern internally was that since our DNS servers were unable to reach Dyn they would be consuming resources waiting on timeouts and retrying. The first question I asked the DNS team was: “Are we seeing increased DNS response latency?” rapidly followed by “If this gets worse are we likely to?”. Happily, the response to both those questions (after the team analyzed the situation) was no.

CC BY-SA 2.0 image by tracyshaun

However, that didn’t mean we had nothing to do. Operating a large scale system like Cloudflare that deals with the continuously changing nature of the Internet means that there’s always something to learn.

Back in July 2015 Dyn had an outage that also affected some of our customers and we changed our handling of so-called infrastructure DNS records in response to prevent a similar problem, from any provider, affecting Cloudflare.

Based on what we learned last Friday we are making some changes to our internal DNS infrastructure so that it performs better when a major provider is having problems or an outage (whether caused by DDoS or not). To understand those changes it’s helpful to take a look at the role of DNS and what we saw on Friday.

The Domain Name System (DNS) provides an address book service for the Internet. It is responsible for converting the friendly, human-readable domain names we type into our web browsers to IP addresses for websites. Let’s walk through the life of an example web request to see where DNS plays a role.

We can start by entering a web address into our browser, https://www.cloudflare.com/. The browser translates this name into an IP address so it can contact the server that’s hosting the page, it will do this using DNS. We can make these DNS queries ourselves using the dig command line tool to see what values are returned.

$ dig www.cloudflare.com A
...
;; QUESTION SECTION:
;www.cloudflare.com.		IN	A


;; ANSWER SECTION:
www.cloudflare.com.	10	IN	A	198.41.215.162
www.cloudflare.com.	10	IN	A	198.41.214.162

The DNS data model is split into two core concepts, names and records. The name here is www.cloudflare.com and the record type we have queried is A, which is used to store IPv4 addresses. There are other types of records for storing other types of data, e.g AAAA records for IPv6 addresses. We can see from the answer above that there are two IPv4 addresses for www.cloudflare.com; the browser picks one of these to use.

Records in the DNS also have an associated TTL which defines how long the data should be cached for, these records have a TTL of 10 seconds. This means the browser can store this information and skip making further DNS queries for the domain for the next 10 seconds.

For Cloudflare customers, the answer will contain our Anycast IPs instead of the origin ones (the IP addresses of the web hosting provider). The browser will then send requests to us, and we will serve content from our cache or proxy the request to the origin web server.

There are two common ways of configuring origins on Cloudflare. The first is to specify A and AAAA records, which explicitly provides us with the IP addresses of the origin. In this situation, our network knows ahead of time where it can contact the origin, so no further DNS resolution is required. For example, if www.example.com uses Cloudflare and has specified 2001:db8:5ca1:ab1e as the IP address of the origin server in the Cloudflare control panel, we can connect directly to the origin server to retrieve resources.

The other is to use a CNAME, which is a pointer to another DNS name.

When our servers receive a request with the origin configured using a CNAME, we have to perform an external DNS lookup to resolve the target of the CNAME to IP addresses. This information is cached, based on the TTL defined on the CNAME record. In this case, our ability to serve content (that is not in the cache) entirely depends on an external DNS lookup to resolve the CNAME to IPs.

For example, suppose www.example.com had set up a CNAME in the Cloudflare control panel pointing to server11.myhostingprovider.biz it would be necessary to look up the IP address of server11.myhostingprovider.biz before contacting the origin server.

In many cases the target of a CNAME is handled by a third party DNS provider. If the third party provider is unable to answer our query, we are unable to resolve the domain to an origin IP and cannot serve the request.

As Dyn says in their discussion of the DDoS attack there were three distinct waves. For Cloudflare that manifested itself in two periods during which our internal DNS query error rate spiked.

The first attack started at 1110 UTC and mostly affected DNS resolution on the US East Coast. This world map from our monitoring systems shows the Cloudflare data centers where the DNS error rate was spiking because of the Dyn outage.

The green dots on the map are Cloudflare data centers that were unaffected by the Dyn DDoS. The largest effect was on the US East Coast, although the attack had a knock-on effect in Singapore and some parts of Europe. This is most likely because the architecture of the Internet does not directly line up with geography. Locations that are physically disparate can sometimes appear ‘close’ on the Internet because of undersea cables or decisions on how to route traffic.

The chart shows the DNS error rate in each Cloudflare data center affected by the outage. It’s possible to see the attack ramp up rapidly and then remained sustained until Dyn was able to tackle it.

Later in the day the attackers returned with greater force and had a worldwide impact. This map shows the Cloudflare data centers seeing errors because Dyn was inaccessible. As you can see almost the entire planet was affected (with the exception of our China locations; we’ll return to why below).

Once again it’s possible to see the attack ramping up at 1550 UTC and continuing for some time. Dyn reports that the attack was fully mitigated at 1700 UTC.

Media and Dyn reported a third wave of attacks later on Friday, but Dyn mitigated that wave immediately and so fast that it did not have any affect on Cloudflare protected websites and applications and did not show up in our systems.

During the most intense period of attack on Dyn our locations in China were almost completely unaffected. That’s because we handle DNS a little differently inside China.

To cope with sometimes fluctuating network conditions inside China our data centers are configured to keep DNS records for origin servers cached in our servers for longer than the rest of the world. This caching meant that even though Dyn was down and couldn’t be reached from anywhere (including China) we still had cached DNS records for sites that used Dyn on our China servers. Thus we were able to reach origin servers and continue serving content. That shows up as green dots on the map above.

Unfortunately, there’s a downside to hanging on to DNS records for a long time: if one of our customers changes their origin’s DNS records we’ll keep using the old DNS records and IP addresses. That could lead to downtime, or poor service.

The ideal system would recheck DNS records frequently so that changes are reflected quickly but in the event that the upstream DNS provider was unavailable (because of an attack or other outage) it would be able to use the DNS records it has cached.

Doing so is known as ‘serve stale while revalidating’. Our upstream DNS resolvers will cache records checking frequently for changes. If the upstream DNS is unavailable we’ll continue to serve from cache until it’s possible to refresh the DNS records.

We are testing and rolling out that change now and expect this to greatly diminish the impact of events similar to the Dyn DDoS for all of our customers who use CNAME’d DNS records that rely on a third-party DNS provider.

The Internet is a shared space. Because companies, people, and institutions work together we have a global, connected network that allows us to work and play from almost anywhere. Cooperation means that we work together on standards and interoperability to keep the network running and evolving.

But the Internet is very complex and, as with many things, the devil is in the details and operating Internet infrastructure is a process of constant improvement. Although the Dyn DDoS felt scary to many people unfamiliar with how the Internet operates, such attacks result in a stronger network. Just as Cloudflare is making changes to its software and configuration, so are others across the net.

We are always looking to hire smart people interested in making DNS and the Internet better for everyone. Jobs can be found here.

Each birthday has given us the opportunity to thank our customers with new announcements, from our automatic IPv6 Gateway to making SSL free and easy for all to unveiling our China network. Launching 14 new data center locations is one of many gifts to our users we’ll reveal this week.

Cloudflare global network (orange: new data center, purple: existing data center)

Six years ago, within weeks of Cloudflare launching, we passed a major milestone: serving one billion web requests across our network every month. Since then, our traffic has grown 10,000x, and we now see over a billion web requests every month just from the country of Angola — located on the western coast of southern Africa and three times the geographic size of California. This led us on a journey to deploy our newest data center in Luanda, the capital city, shaving 150ms in latency off every request and joining our existing Africa data centers in Cairo, Mombasa and Johannesburg.

Latency (ms) decreases 10x for an Internet user in Luanda to Cloudflare. Source: Cedexis

Angola has seen a 280x increase in Internet users over the past 15 years, growing to 6 million Internet people. This figure is already higher than Denmark, and growing ten times as fast. That said, even today, fewer than one in four Angolans are online so there’s huge potential for more growth ahead. We’re committed to building infrastructure across Africa and to supporting the next billion people coming online.

In the United States, where Internet penetration is significantly higher (~90%), our expansion continues as we announce the launch of seven data centers at one go: Boston, Las Vegas, Nashville, Omaha, Philadelphia, St Louis, and Tampa. Many of our customers are businesses and blogs alike serving visitors in these markets in US states with a combined population of over 50 million people. Our newest US data centers not only reduce latency for millions of websites, but also provide additional redundancy to each other and to our existing North America data centers in Ashburn, Atlanta, Chicago, Dallas, Denver, Los Angeles, Miami, Minneapolis, Montréal, Newark, Phoenix, San Jose, Seattle, Toronto, and Vancouver.

Cloudflare began as winners of the Harvard Business Plan competition in Boston, and the admission programs at both Harvard and MIT — two great Boston-based universities — are proud Cloudflare customers. We are very proud to now operate a data center in Boston. Since our last birthday, we have doubled both the number of data centers, and our aggregate edge capacity in North America.

Iberian peninsula (including Lisbon, Portugal) courtesy of NASA Earth Observatory

Our newest European data centers in Athens, Lisbon and Helsinki truly represent the breadth of the 750 million person continent, and join our existing datacenters in Amsterdam, Berlin, Brussels, Bucharest, Copenhagen, Dublin, Düsseldorf, Frankfurt, Hamburg, Kiev, London, Madrid, Manchester, Marseille, Milan, Moscow, Oslo, Paris, Prague, Sofia, Stockholm, Vienna, Warsaw, and Zürich. (To close observers of the Iberian peninsula photo, there is another major city displayed which is days away from having a live Cloudflare data center).

While our Buenos Aires, Argentina data center has held the record for being our southernmost deployment (34° S), Helsinki now takes the prize for our northernmost deployment (60° N), and becomes our third PoP within 500 miles (800 km) of the Arctic Circle.

Over 9,000 miles away (14,500 km), one of the farthest cities from Helsinki is the sunny city of Brisbane, Australia, also home to a new Cloudflare data center. This is our fifth data center in the region, joining Auckland, Melbourne, Perth and Sydney.

There is no excuse now for Telstra and Optus not to peer with us as we have physical presence in the four largest population centers in Australia.

Manila, Philippines. Source: Jensen Ching (Flickr)

New data centers in Manila and Shanghai further grow our Asia network to 37 unique cities, joining Bangkok, Chengdu, Chennai, Doha, Dongguan, Dubai, Foshan, Fuzhou, Guangzhou, Hangzhou, Hengyang, Jinan, Hong Kong, Kuala Lumpur, Kuwait City, Langfang, Luoyang, Mumbai, Muscat, Nanning, New Delhi, Osaka, Qingdao, Seoul, Shenyang, Shijiazhuang, Singapore, Suzhou, Taipei, Tokyo, Wuhan, Wuxi, Xi’an, Zhengzhou, and Zhuzhou.

Our global expansion is by no means done with these fourteen freshly deployed data centers, as we have twice as many additional cities in the works right now.

While new cities make for especially fun announcements, under the hood, we’ve been making a series of upgrades to prepare for the demands of the next generation of Internet-facing applications. These include:

• achieving high security and compliance standards

• deploying our newest generation of servers and networking gear

• growing our interconnection through both private peering and at more public internet exchanges than any other company, while doubling our network capacity to 10 Tbps (more than the publicly announced DDoS scrubbing capacity of all our competitors combined)

• increasing our availability by solving gnarly edge cases and deploying greater automation

Every Cloudflare server globally can perform all our features such as DDoS mitigation, DNS, HTTP2 support, SSL and our newest offerings to be announced later this week. We’re grateful for our customers’ support on our journey to these first 100 data centers, and look forward to the next 100.

－ The Cloudflare Team

CC BY-SA 2.0 image by Quinn Dombrowski

Two years ago, we previewed the relative cost of bandwidth that we see in different parts of the world. Bandwidth is the largest recurring cost of providing our service. Compared with Europe and North America, there were considerably higher Internet costs in Australia, Asia and Latin America. Even while bandwidth costs tend to trend down over time, driven by competition and decreases in the costs of underlying hardware, we thought it might be interesting to provide an update.

Since August 2014, we have tripled the number of our data centers from 28 to 86, with more to come. CloudFlare hardware is also deployed in new regions such as the Middle East and Africa. Our network spans multiple countries in each continent, and, sometimes, multiple cities in each country.

Traffic across 86 data centers in the CloudFlare network

There are approximately thirteen networks called “Tier 1 networks” (e.g., Telia, GTT, Tata, Cogent) who sell “transit” to access any of thousands of other networks on the Internet using their global backbones, including networks who are not their customers. We connect to networks by either purchasing transit from a global "Tier 1 network" (or major regional network), or by exchanging traffic directly with a carrier or ISP using “peering”. Typically, peered traffic is exchanged without settlement between the peered parties.

We try to make it as easy as possible for networks to interconnect with us. CloudFlare has an “open peering” policy, and participates at nearly 150 internet exchanges, more than any other company.

As a benchmark, let's assume the cost of transit in Europe and North America is 10 units (per Mbps). With that benchmark in place, without disclosing exact pricing, we can compare regions by transit cost, percentage of peering, and their effective blended cost (transit + peering).

Europe Transit vs Peering (Last 30 Days)

Based on our benchmark, the transit cost is 10 units. The region has a large number of Internet exchanges, typically non-profit, where we peer around 60% of our traffic. This makes for an effective regional cost of 4 units.

With perhaps the notable exception of the incumbent in Germany, many networks are supportive of open interconnection. CloudFlare already participates at 40 European internet exchanges, and is in the process of joining at least five more.

North America Transit vs Peering (Last 30 Days)

The cost of transit in North America is equal to the cost in Europe, or 10 units. We peer around 40% of our traffic, resulting in an effective regional cost of 6 units.

The level of peering in North America is less than in Europe, but a significant improvement over two years ago. The share of peered traffic is expected to grow. Some material changes have occurred and are occurring in the North American market, such as Frontier acquiring Verizon FiOS customers in three U.S. States and Charter preparing to merge with Time Warner Cable. We can see these changes making an impact to the regional interconnection landscape.

Notably, our peering has particularly grown in smaller regional locations, closer to the end visitor, leading to an improvement in performance. This could be through private peering, or via an interconnection point such as the Midwest Internet Cooperative Exchange (MICE) in Minneapolis.

Africa Transit vs Peering (Last 30 Days)

Transit prices in Africa are amongst the highest in the world at 14 times the benchmark or 140 units, with notable variance across the continent, from Cairo to Mombasa to Johannesburg. Fortunately, of the traffic that we are currently able to serve locally in Africa, we manage to peer about 90% (with a mix of carriers and ISPs), making for an effective cost of 14 units.

Our African deployments help us avoid the significant latency of serving websites from London, Paris or Marseille. A particularly promising but challenging region where we hope to deploy a CloudFlare data center is West Africa - specifically Nigeria, which is already at just under 100 million Internet users.

Middle East Transit vs Peering (Last 30 Days)

CloudFlare currently has four data centers in the Middle East, each of which are cache deployments with strategic ISP partners to serve their respective customers. We are able to peer all the traffic currently served from these data centers. While these collectively provide significant coverage, there is additional traffic (reaching Europe) that we would like to localize in the region. We hope that the remaining ISPs, such as Saudi Telecom Company, deploy similar caches, and enhance the performance of their customers.

Because we can peer 100% of our traffic in the Middle East, our effective pricing for bandwidth in the region is 0 units. There are, of course, other costs to delivering our service beyond bandwidth. However, by driving up peering rates in the Middle East we’ve been able to make our service in the Middle East extremely cost competitive.

Asia Transit vs Peering (Last 30 Days)

In Asia (excluding the Middle East), transit costs 7 times times the benchmark, or 70 units. However, we peer about 60% of our traffic, resulting in an effective cost of 28 units.

Beyond the major meeting points in Hong Kong, Singapore and Tokyo, a significant portion of our interconnection is localized to take place closer to visitors in cities such as Bangkok, Chennai, Kuala Lumpur, Mumbai, Osaka, New Delhi, Seoul, and Taipei. These statistics do not include our network of strategically located data centers inside of mainland China, where the dynamics of interconnection are entirely unique.

Two Asian locations stand out as being especially expensive: Seoul and Taipei. In these markets, with powerful incumbents (Korea Telecom and HiNet), transit costs 15x as much as in Europe or North America, or 150 units.

South Korea is perhaps the only country in the world where bandwidth costs are going up. This may be driven by new regulations from the Ministry of Science, ICT and Future Planning, which mandate the commercial terms of domestic interconnection, based on predetermined “Tiers” of participating networks. This is contrary to the model in most parts of the world, where networks self-regulate, and often peer without settlement. The government even prescribes the rate at which prices should decrease per year (-7.5%), which is significantly slower than the annual drop in unit bandwidth costs elsewhere in the world. We are only able to peer 2% of our traffic in South Korea.

If you include HiNet and Korea Telecom in our blended bandwidth pricing, and take into account peering, our effective price is 28 units. If you exclude HiNet and Korea Telecom, our effective price is 14 units.

South America Transit vs Peering (Last 30 Days)

Transit prices in South America are very high, costing 17 times the benchmark, or 170 units. We peer about 60% of traffic in South America, making for an effective cost of 68 units.

One of the reasons that transit prices are high is that the Tier 1 networks which are newer entrants to this region have yet to pick up significant market share. While markets such as Brazil are less expensive and have greater peering, costs are highest in countries such as Peru and Argentina where, in each, a single incumbent provider, respectively Telefonica and Telecom Argentina, controls access for the last mile delivery of content to the majority of Internet users.

As we try to increase our share of peered traffic, one of the challenges we face is that many Internet exchanges (e.g., NAP Colombia) only permit domestically incorporated and licensed networks to publicly peer, or in another case, require a unanimous vote of all members on an IX to permit a new participant, effectively creating a separation between “international content” and “domestic content”.

If you include Telecom Argentina and Telefonica, our blended cost of bandwidth in South America is 68 units. If you exclude these two providers then our blended cost is 17 units.

Oceania Transit vs Peering (Last 30 Days)

Transit prices in Oceania (Australia and New Zealand) are lower than they used to be, but continue to be extremely high in relative terms, costing 17 times the benchmark from Europe, or 170 units. We peer 50% of our traffic, resulting in an effective cost of 85 units.

If you exclude Optus and Telstra, then the price falls to 17 units — because we peer with nearly everyone else.

Relative Cost of Bandwidth

CloudFlare has always optimized where we serve customers to take into account our effective costs. If you are a free customer using an excessive amount of expensive transit, we would serve you from fewer regions. The good news is that, over the last five years, we’ve been able to negotiate reasonable transit pricing or settlement-free peering with the vast majority of the world’s networks. That allows us to continue to provide the free version of our service as well as to keep prices low for all our paid services.

Today, however, there are six expensive networks (HiNet, Korea Telecom, Optus, Telecom Argentina, Telefonica, Telstra) that are more than an order of magnitude more expensive than other bandwidth providers around the globe and refuse to discuss local peering relationships. To give you a sense, these six networks represent less than 6% of the traffic but nearly 50% of our bandwidth costs.

While we’ve tried to engage all these providers to reduce their extremely high costs and ensure that even our Free customers can be served across their networks, we’ve hit an impasse. To that end, unfortunately, we’ve made the decision that the only thing that will change these providers’ pricing is to make it clear how out of step they are with the rest of the world. To demonstrate this, we’ve moved our Free customers off these six transit providers. Free customers will still be accessible across our network and served from another regional cache with more reasonable bandwidth pricing.

Ironically, this actually increases the cost to several of these providers because they now need to backhaul traffic to another CloudFlare data center and pay more in the process. For instance, if Telstra were to peer with CloudFlare then they would only have to move traffic over about 30 meters of fiber optic cable between our adjoining cages in the same data center. Now Telstra will need to backhaul traffic to Free customers to Los Angeles or Singapore over expensive undersea cables. Their behavior is irrational in any competitive market and so it is not a surprise that each of these providers is a relative monopolist in their home market.

If you’re a Free CloudFlare customer who cares about optimizing the best possible performance from one of these six providers then we encourage you to reach out to them and encourage them to follow a core principle of a free and open Internet and not abuse their monopoly position. We are committed to serving all our customers across every network that peers with us. To that end, help us convince these six networks to be on the right side of a free and open Internet by reaching out to your ISP.

• Ask HiNet to peer with CloudFlare in Taipei

• Ask Korea Telecom to peer with CloudFlare in Seoul

• Ask Optus to peer with CloudFlare across Australia

• Ask Telecom Argentina to peer with CloudFlare in Buenos Aires

• Ask Telefonica to peer with CloudFlare across South America

• Ask Telstra to peer with CloudFlare across Australia

We’ll post updates as we negotiate with these six networks and are hopeful that we’ll soon be able to serve all our customers across all the networks we interconnect with.