Even as the luckiest amongst us across the US West Coast dashed off to Oregon to be closer to the solar eclipse path of totality, Cloudflare engineers were busy turning up our newest data center in Portland.

This deployment serves as our 27th data center in North America alone, and our 117th globally. It also provides additional redundancy to our Seattle and San Jose data centers, while increasing our capacity to run services and fight growing attacks.

The Silicon Forest corridor around Portland holds a special place in the hearts of the Cloudflare team. It is both new (by way of our latest edge deployment bringing us closer to millions of Oregon Internet users), and familiar (since we have had an internal data center in this region for many years, enabling services such as analytics and enterprise logs).

The greater Portland area has played a pivotal area in building high-technology products from companies such as Tektronix (test and measurement equipment), Mentor Graphics (electronic design automation) and Intel (with nearly 20,000 employees across Oregon).

At our Portland data center, we locally interconnect with ISPs such as Comcast (into their regional area networks such as Beaverton and Troutdale), and also to the Northwest Access Exchange (a volunteer non-profit internet exchange fostering peering).

This is part of a much broader expansion, as we are actively working on at least a dozen additional data centers within North America alone, and over 50 new cities around the world. If managing the moving parts of building a large global network sounds interesting, come join us!

JS Conf EU 2016. Photo by Holger Blank.

If you’re at JS Conf EU (May 6-7) or CSS Conf EU (May 5):

• Be sure to make it to John Fawcett’s session, “Invisible Code: Building JavaScript Libraries For Non-Technical People.”

• Made a Cloudflare App? Drop by the Cloudflare Hacker Lounge to show me and I have a special gift for you.

• Started working on a Cloudflare App and have questions? Drop by the Cloudflare Hacker Lounge and get them answered.

Just happen to be in Berlin? Tweet @qiqing and @IcyApril to come hang out with us in person.

Cloudflare Apps Preview. Visualize your app here.

Join the core developers of Cloudflare Apps for the inaugural Cloudflare meetup in Austin. It will feature an introduction by Zack Bloom (tech lead) to the new Cloudflare Apps including details of how apps get created, moderated, installed, and served to millions of users all over the world.

Bring your laptops!

What: Zack Bloom: “How to make a Cloudflare App: Developer Preview”Where: Capital Factory, 701 Brazos St Ste 1601, Austin, TXWhen: Thursday, May 11, 2017; 6:00 PM to 9:00 PM

RSVP on meetup.com >>

Core devs will be on-hand to help answer questions and serve as teaching assistants. T-shirts and dinner for every attendee. Special goodies for everyone who makes and tests an app.

Eric Teffen Ellis (core dev) will be live-coding a Cloudflare App, followed by Q&A. Bring your laptops! New coders and new friends welcome. Say hi, make noise, and ask questions.

What: Eric Teffen Ellis: “Building apps for the web with Cloudflare.”Where: Vacasa, 926 NW 13th Ave #200, Portland, ORWhen: Thursday, May 11, 2017; 6:00 PM to 9:00 PM

RSVP for PDX Node on meetup.com >>

T-shirts and pizza for everyone.

Want to host a Cloudflare event? Want to request a speaker to teach Cloudflare Apps to your group? Drop a line to community@cloudflare.com.

Our ops team is on a roll! Hot on the heels of Sydney and Atlanta going live yesterday, we're happy to announce Seattle, Washington as the location of CloudFlare's 17th data center. We just turned on the facility and traffic will ramp up over the next few hours. The facility will help serve traffic from the Pacific Northwest and take load off San Jose, which is one of our busiest data centers currently.

This update also marks a dramatic change to the CloudFlare Network Map. For quite some time, the map matched the overall color scheme of CloudFlare's site and represented the land mass with a blue color. You'd be amazed how many customers wrote in to tell us that we'd made a mistake and the water should be blue, not the land. It became a bit of a joke around the office.

It is therefore with some sadness I report that Kevin, our designer, has given in to the masses and switched away from the blue land network map. The new map represents everything as shades of gray. I find it somewhat more ominous, but hopefully it'll end people's confusion.

Oh, and in the process of writing this, I just noticed we crossed 400 billion page views through our network and 40 petabytes of bandwidth saved for our users, which is pretty cool too. Stay tuned, six more data centers coming online soon. Any guesses what city in what country we'll turn on next?