When Cloudflare launched, three of the original five cities in our network - Chicago, Ashburn and San Jose - were located in the United States. Since then, we have grown the breadth of the global network considerably to span 66 countries, and even expanded the US footprint to twenty five locations. Even as a highly international business, the United States continues to be home to a number of our customers and the majority of Cloudflare employees.

Today, we expand our network in the United States even further by adding five new locations: Houston (Texas), Indianapolis (Indiana), Montgomery (Alabama), Pittsburgh (Pennsylvania) and Sacramento (California) as our 129th, 130th, 131st, 132nd and 133rd data centers respectively. They represent states that collectively span nearly 100 million people. In North America alone, the Cloudflare network now spans 37 cities, including thirty in the US.

In each of these new locations, we connect with at least one major local Internet service provider and also openly peer using at least one major Internet exchange. We are participants at CyrusOne IX Houston, Midwest IX Indianapolis, Montgomery Internet Exchange, Pittsburgh IX, and the upcoming Sacramento IX.

These deployments improves performance, security and reliability for our customers, even while expanding the edge (and the compute capability it enables). In the not too distant future, we’d like to deploy at cell towers across major metro markets (and beyond!) to support the next generation of 5G-enabled applications.

With the launch of our next data center, Cloudflare will have deployments located in all of the ten most populous North American metropolitan areas.

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 announce deployments in Detroit (Michigan) and San Diego (California), which are our 114th and 115th data centers respectively. They join Colombo, Sri Lanka and Cape Town, South Africa in the cohort of four new cities added just this week to our growing global network, which spans 57 countries and counting.

For over 6 million Internet properties, we now serve customer traffic from across 26 North American cities, including 22 in the United States alone. We're not going to stop building our network until we're within milliseconds of every Internet user, and to that end, data centers are already in the works in eight additional North American cities (and many others around the world).

_Source: Baja Insider_

Detroit and San Diego share something special, as they are immediately adjacent to international borders with Canada and Mexico respectively. Detroit has four border crossings to Windsor, Ontario, including the Ambassador Bridge, which was built in the Roaring Twenties, and accommodates over a quarter of all merchandise trade with Canada.

Founded in 1701, and best known for cars and Motown, Detroit eagerly awaits a 3,000 pound bronze RoboCop statue to watch over Delta City (track progress here). An early member of our technical operations team and fan of Detroit Techno is especially excited that this month's Movement Electronic Music Festival is a Cloudflare customer.

San Diego, the second largest city (by population) in California, is home to deep canyons and its world renowned San Diego Zoo. Later this month, skateboarders across San Diego will celebrate Tony Hawk Day.

Projects such as the non-profit Internet exchange DET-IX, enable greater regional interconnection, bringing together hosts, ISPs, and "edge" networks (such as Cloudflare), to exchange traffic locally instead of further away in Chicago. As we turn up peering with additional networks in the coming weeks, we expect to serve a growing share of Internet users in Detroit and San Diego right from their city.

Stay tuned for more data centers. The world's bluest sky will soon welcome the Cloudflare orange cloud.

As it turns out, it takes a lot of work to stop massive attacks and to help make the web faster. Over the past six months, our entire team has contributed in every way imaginable to more than double the capacity of our global network. Below is a behind-the-scenes look into how we keep our global network running.

Along the way we’ve encountered many surprises—some fun and some cringe worthy—that have taught us about our team, our data centers and overcoming challenges that occasionally seem beyond our control.

• San Jose, US (SJC): Our counsel, Ken, is great at pumpkin carving, and even better at standing up to protect the privacy rights of our users (including against Kanye West’s army of lawyers). What you may not have known is that he is happiest in the data center (not to mention our cabling was much prettier when he finished!).

  

  Ken, our counsel

• Los Angeles, US (LAX): Our engineers monitor our network around the clock. Occasionally this means juggling multiple tasks. During our most recent upgrade, Joshua (Systems Reliability Engineer & super dad) managed to snatch a moment to put his kids to bed while managing simultaneous upgrades in Los Angeles and Stockholm.

• Chicago, US (ORD): Just before our Chicago upgrade we learned that our carrier had misplaced a shipment of memory. Fortunately, Nitin (Special Projects) averted disaster and got the courier to radio the driver (it took some convincing!), find and grab our DIMMs, and get the install done in time. When most people think of Chicago they think of the ‘95-96 Chicago Bulls (arguably the greatest basketball team to step foot on this earth). When we think of Chicago, our minds turn to the bullwhip effect. We precisely plan every data center launch and upgrade throughout the entire supply chain—from cables to servers to shipping schedules—to control against situations where precautions amplify errors.

• Dallas, US (DFW): At CloudFlare, stamina is key. Trey (Solution Engineer) experienced this first hand. Despite working through the night on our Dallas upgrade, he still managed to catch a 6:30 AM flight the following morning to San Antonio, where he ran a workshop for our friends at Rackspace.

• Ashburn, US (IAD): An important customer meeting the following morning didn’t stop Matthew (CEO) and Trey (Solution Engineer) from working through the night to upgrade our Ashburn facility. Trey even realized he could use his toenail clippers to save time cutting zipties and keep the install moving.

Home is where the datacenter is

• Hong Kong, HK (HKG): After speaking at an Internet security conference in China, Joshua (Special Projects Lead) spent three consecutive nights upgrading our Seoul, Tokyo and Hong Kong data centers. In addition to the data center, he found airport lounges and taxis to be equally habitable.

• London, GB (LHR): CloudFlare’s first international office opened in London in 2013. Since then we’ve enlisted an amazing team of engineers to keep our network humming 24x7x365. On more than a few occasions, James (Systems Reliability Engineer), Marty (Support Engineer) and Simon (Support Engineer) have found a warm room full of servers in our London facility a comfort on a bitter winter night.

• Stockholm, SE (ARN): Simon (Support Engineer) managed to navigate to the local Kjell to pick up a few needed power adapters, and then braved the 1° C cold outside of our Stockholm data center for a bit longer than he would have liked while waiting for an access card.

• Miami, US (MIA): We take security seriously, and so do our data center partners. Justin (Systems Reliability Engineer) was at least a little intimidated to find guards armed with machine guns protecting the entrance of our Miami facility.

• Tokyo, JP (NRT): We love our data centers so much that we even name our conference rooms after them. As our San Francisco office expands (we’ve now knocked down two walls!), we’ve named the latest NRT.

New challenges

• Atlanta, US (ATL): Each of our racks around the world are fitted with high tech PDUs (power distribution units) that allow for remote monitoring and power cycling. This allows us to monitor our infrastructure in real-time, and react at a moment’s notice. When our colocation provider in Atlanta told us that our PDU wouldn’t fit, giving up wasn’t an option. Joshua (Special Projects Lead) proposed a rack extender to do the trick!

• Paris, FR (CDG): Imagine being told that equipment you had just shipped 5,000 miles across the globe was about to be sent right back. Jérôme (Network Engineer), one of our resident French speakers, saved the day and made sure our equipment stayed right where it belonged: working hard in support of one of our busiest datacenters. Merci Jérôme!

• Seattle, US (SEA): We install console servers with out-of-band, cellular Internet access in each of our data centers to remotely manage our infrastructure in the case our primary Internet connectivity is lost. While this makes it easier to address connectivity issues, installing the equipment itself can occasionally be more difficult. With a SIM card stubbornly lodged into our console server in Seattle, Jerome (Partner Engineer) used what he had available—namely, dental floss and a pair of forceps—to get the job done in a way that even MacGyver would approve.

• Seoul, KR (ICN): Korea ranks near the top of most challenging locations to import equipment into (right up there with Warsaw). Fortunately, having facilitated hundreds of shipments in dozens of countries, Nitin (Special Projects) was able to break through a two month logjam in which Incheon airport became a temporary home for some of our equipment. Among his other talents, Nitin can now hum the FedEx and DHL songs in nearly any language of your choice.

• Valparaíso, CL (SCL): Sometimes events are just out of one’s control. To launch our newest data center we had to wait through multiple customs strikes before equipment could arrive. Still, the show went on. Tom (Network Engineer) worked through Christmas to shave 170ms off of latency for our users in Latin America.

What’s in store for 2014, you ask? Over the next 12 months we will significantly expand our data center footprint, adding facilities in regions we currently lack coverage: Latin America, the Middle East, Africa, and parts of Asia. China is our second largest market, Brazil is our third: in 2014 we’ll be significantly expanding our network to better serve these customers.

If this sounds like fun, and if you enjoy a few surprises every once in a while, please consider joining us. We’re actively recruiting for someone passionate and talented to assist with our expansion.

Swimming pools, movie stars, and now CloudFlare!

We just turned on our latest data center (#6) in Los Angeles. In its first minute, the facility processed more than 30,000 requests. We expect that number to rise over the next 24 hours. The Los Angeles data center will take load away from San Jose, which has traditionally been one of our busiest data centers, and will provide faster service for Hollywood types and other visitors coming from the Southwestern United States.

The Los Angeles data center (which we refer to internally as LAX, after the region's airport) is also the first new CloudFlare facility to include the second generation of our hardware stack. We'll be publishingmore details about the benefits of our new hardware stack, as well as more announcements of new data centers, in the next few weeks. Stay tuned!

We often get asked why adding more data centers matters. There are several technical reasons, but as a simple overview: If a visitor that lives in San Francisco visits a website on the Cloudflare platform, the visitor gets routed to the San Jose data center. Whereas, if a visitor that lives in Chicago requests the same website, then the visitor gets routed through our Chicago data center. Without Cloudflare, visitors are typically routed through one data center. So if the data center is in San Jose, then the San Francisco visitor has the same experience, but the Chicago-based visitor's request has to go all the way from Chicago to San Jose. This of course takes longer than if the request just had to go to another address in Chicago.

So, by routing traffic through data centers closest to the visitor, the visitor sees a performance boost to the website they are visiting. There is a lot of research that shows that the faster a website loads, the longer a visitor stays. Cloudflare wants to make it easy for any website online to have fast site performance so their visitors keep coming back.

Sri is our network engineer that makes sure everyone's traffic gets delivered quickly. Here he is in the San Jose data center. It was a long day getting the servers and other equipment racked, but Sri kept his calm. A lot of data bits are flowing through these cables now. Thanks Sri!