So far in 2019, we’ve added a score of new locations: Amman, Antananarivo*, Arica*, Asunción, Baku, Bengaluru, Buffalo, Casablanca, Córdoba*, Cork, Curitiba, Dakar*, Dar es Salaam, Fortaleza, Geneva, Göteborg, Guatemala City, Hyderabad, Kigali, Kolkata, Male*, Maputo, Nagpur, Neuquén*, Nicosia, Nouméa, Ottawa, Port-au-Prince, Porto Alegre, Querétaro, Ramallah, and Thessaloniki.

When Cloudflare launched in 2010, we focused on putting servers at the Internet’s crossroads: large data centers with key connections, like the Amsterdam Internet Exchange and Equinix Ashburn. This not only provided the most value to the most people at once but was also easier to manage by keeping our servers in the same buildings as all the local ISPs, server providers, and other people they needed to talk to streamline our services.

This is a great approach for bootstrapping a global network, but we’re obsessed with speed in general. There are over five hundred cities in the world with over one million inhabitants, but only a handful of them have the kinds of major Internet exchanges that we targeted. Our goal as a company is to help make a better Internet for all, not just those lucky enough to live in areas with affordable and easily-accessible interconnection points. However, we ran up against two broad, nasty problems: a) running out of major Internet exchanges and b) latency still wasn’t as low as we wanted. Clearly, we had to start scaling in new ways.

One of our first big steps was entering into partnerships around the world with local ISPs, who have many of the same problems we do: ISPs want to save money and provide fast Internet to their customers, but they often don’t have a major Internet exchange nearby to connect to. Adding Cloudflare equipment to their infrastructure effectively brought more of the Internet closer to them. We help them speed up millions of Internet properties while reducing costs by serving traffic locally. Additionally, since all of our servers are designed to support all our products, a relatively small physical footprint can also provide security, performance, reliability, and more.

Though it may be obvious and easy to overlook, continuing to build out existing locations is also a key facet of building a global network. This year, we have significantly increased the computational capacity at the edge of our network. Additionally, by making it easier to interconnect with Cloudflare, we have increased the number of unique networks directly connected with us to over 8,000. This makes for a faster, more reliable Internet experience for the >1 billion IPs that we see daily.

To make these capacity upgrades possible for our customers, efficient infrastructure deployment has been one of our keys to success. We want our infrastructure deployment to be targeted and flexible.

The next Cloudflare customer through our door could be a small restaurant owner on a Pro plan with thousands of monthly pageviews or a fast-growing global tech company like Discord. As a result, we need to always stay one step ahead and synthesize a lot of data all at once for our customers.

To accommodate this expansion, our Capacity Planning team is learning new ways to optimize our servers. One key strategy is targeting exactly where to send our servers. However, staying on top of everything isn’t easy - we are a global anycast network, which introduces unpredictability as to where incoming traffic goes. To make things even more difficult, each city can contain as many as five distinct deployments. Planning isn’t just a question of what city to send servers to, it’s one of which address.

To make sense of it all, we tackle the problem with simulations. Some, but not all, of the variables we model include historical traffic growth rates, foreseeable anomalous spikes (e.g., Cyber Day in Chile), and consumption states from our live deal pipeline, as well as product costs, user growth, end-customer adoption. We also add in site reliability, potential for expansion, and expected regional expansion and partnerships, as well as strategic priorities and, of course, feedback from our fantastic Systems Reliability Engineers.

Knowing where to send a server is only the first challenge of many when it comes to a global network. Just like our user base, our supply chain must span the entire world while also staying flexible enough to quickly react to time constraints, pricing changes including taxes and tariffs, import/export restrictions and required certifications - not to mention local partnerships many more dynamic location-specific variables. Even more reason we have to stay quick on our feet, there will always be unforeseen roadblocks and detours even in the most well-prepared plans. For example, a planned expansion in our Prague location might warrant an expanded presence in Vienna for failover.

Once servers arrive at our data centers, our Data Center Deployment and Technical Operations teams work with our vendors and on-site data center personnel (our “Remote Hands” and “Smart Hands”) to install the physical server, manage the cabling, and handle other early-stage provisioning processes.

Our architecture, which is designed so that every server can support every service, makes it easier to withstand hardware failures and efficiently load balance workloads between equipment and between locations.

If working at a rapidly expanding, globally diverse company interests you, we’re hiring for scores of positions, including in the Infrastructure group. If you want to help increase hardware efficiency, deploy and maintain servers, work on our supply chain, or strengthen ISP partnerships, get in touch.

*Represents cities where we have data centers with active Internet ports and where we are configuring our servers to handle traffic for more customers (at the time of publishing)

At 2625 meters (8612 feet) above sea level, Bogotá (Colombia) is one of the four highest capital cities in the world. Now, it is also home to Cloudflare's 149th data center.

This is the 29th city to be added just in March, and joins our existing Colombia datacenter in Medellín, launched four years ago.

CC BY-SA 2.0 image by nigel_sb

Bogotá is the third largest city in South America after São Paulo (Brazil) and Lima (Peru). Bogotanos affectionately known as Rolos are proud of their city with its rich cultural heritage, and its modern transportation systems (Ciclovias, Transmilenio) despite the heavy traffic. Whether you are visiting the world famous gold museum or savoring the mouthwatering Ajiaco soup, Bogotá has something for everyone, and visitors are always warmly received by the locals.

CC BY-SA 2.0 image by krossbow

Bogotá is our 11th deployment in the Latin America and Caribbean Region, and is located at a Tier III facility in the Bogota Free Trade Zone specially developed to attract ICT Investments. We'll continue our expansions in the Latin America and Caribbean region (and around the world!).

Come meet the Cloudflare team at the LACNIC29 Meeting in end April in Panama.

A Cloudflare está muito feliz de anunciar o nosso mais recente data center: Rio de Janeiro, Brasil. Este é o nosso oitavo data center na América do Sul, e com ele a rede da Cloudflare se expande por 116 cidades em 57 países. Este lançamento vai acelerar e proteger mais de seis milhões de sites e aplicações web pelo Brasil, também provendo redundância para o nosso data center em São Paulo. Provendo acesso à nossa rede para mais parceiros através do Ponto de Troca de Tráfego (IX-RJ), nós estamos chegando mais perto dos usuários da Internet em todo o Brasil.

Rio de Janeiro plays a great role in the history of Internet in Brazil. In 1988, the National Laboratory of Scientific Computation, headquartered in Rio de Janeiro connected to the University of Maryland via Bitnet, a network to exchange messages. The next year, the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro also connected to Bitnet, becoming the third institution (with São Paulo State Foundation for Research Support) to have access to this technology.

O Rio de janeiro tem papel central na história da Internet no Brasil. Em 1988, o Laboratório Nacional de Computação Científica (LNCC), conectou-se à Universidade de Mariland através da Bitnet, que era uma rede que permitia o envio de e-mail entre as instituições acadêmicas. Em 1989, a Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro também se conectou na Bitnet através de outra universidade americana, se tornando a terceira instituição Brasileira a se conectar na Internet (a FAPESP também já estava na rede).

_CC BY-NC 2.0 image by Lau Rey_

Today, the city of Rio de Janeiro is very well connected. Internet access can be found all over, and better connectivity can boost entrepreneurship. In some Favelas (slums), the residents are creating their own ISPs, providing Internet access to some users that big ISPs are not able to reach.

Hoje, a cidade do Rio de Janeiro é muito bem conectada. Acesso à internet pode ser encontrado em todo lugar, inclusive incentivando o empreendedorismo. Em algumas favelas os próprios moradores criaram seus provedores de internet via Wi-Fi, e estão proporcionando a inclusão digital em áreas onde os grandes provedores não chegam.

We have an additional eight datacenters in progress across Latin America. If managing the many moving parts of building a large global network interest you, come join our team!

Nós temos mais oito datacenters a caminho na América Latina. Se você se interessa em gerenciar uma rede de alcance global, venha fazer parte do nosso time!

-The Cloudflare team

CC-BY 2.0 image by Scipio

Located only 15 miles from the Equator, we are excited to announce Cloudflare’s newest data center in the World Heritage City of Quito, Ecuador. This deployment is made possible in partnership with the NAP.EC Internet exchange run by AEPROVI (Asociación de empresas proveedoras de servicios de internet). Our newest data center expands Cloudflare’s growing Latin America network to six cities, joining Buenos Aires (Argentina), Lima (Peru), Medellin (Colombia), Sao Paulo (Brazil) and Valparaiso (Chile). Quito is our 104th deployment globally, with over a dozen additional cities in the works right now.

Ubicado a sólo 15 millas del ecuador, estamos contentos de anunciar el nuevo centro de datos de Cloudflare en la ciudad de Quito, Ecuador. Este se realizó en asociación con el intercambio neutral de Internet de NAP.EC administrado por AEPROVI (Asociación de empresas proveedoras de servicios de internet). Este despliegue amplía la red latinoamericana de Cloudflare a seis ciudades: Buenos Aires (Argentina), Lima (Perú), Medellín (Colombia), Sao Paulo (Brasil) y Valparaíso (Chile). Quito es nuestro 104 despliegue global, con más de una docena de ciudades en desarrollo de expansión en este momento.

Cloudflare participates at over 150 Internet exchanges globally with an open peering policy, and welcomes the opportunity to interconnect locally. As additional networks peer with Cloudflare, we’ll be able to localize a growing share of traffic that would have otherwise been served from Miami, while helping support the Internet exchange as a whole. In South America, we are existing members of the Terremark NAP do Brasil, Camara Argentina de Internet (CABASE) Buenos Aires and PTT São Paulo (run by NIC.BR).

Cloudflare participa en más de 150 intercambios de Internet a nivel mundial, con una política de peering abierta que permite conectarse a las principales redes de internet locales. A medida que nuevas redes se interconectan con Cloudflare, podremos redirigir una parte cada vez mayor del tráfico local que de otro modo habría sido proveído por Miami, USA. Además esto ayudará a mejorar el servicio de internet a nivel global. En Sur América, somos miembros de Terremark NAP do Brasil, Cámara Argentina de Internet (CABASE) Buenos Aires y la PTT São Paulo.

With over 350 million Internet users, Latin America is experiencing the second fastest growth globally in mobile penetration. We are now only days away from announcing two additional South American data centers to improve the performance and security of 6 million Internet properties.

Sooner yet is Cloudflare's 105th deployment! After Monday in Asia, and Tuesday in South America, tomorrow, we travel to a new continent. All roads lead to the home of our next data center.

Con más de 350 millones de usuarios conectados, Latinoamérica está experimentando el segundo mayor crecimiento a nivel mundial en penetración móvil. Estamos a pocos días de anunciar dos centros de datos adicionales en América del Sur para mejorar el rendimiento y la seguridad de 6 millones de sitios web.

¡Pronto este será el 105 despliegue de Cloudflare! Ayer inauguramos en Asia, Hoy en América del Sur y mañana viajaremos a un nuevo continente. Cada dia Cloudflare se expande a más países y continentes convirtiéndose así en una de las redes más importantes del mundo.

－ The Cloudflare Team

The Cloudflare network today

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.

At the hackathon we’ll be focusing on implementing the latest draft of TLS 1.3 and testing interoperability between existing implementations written in C, Go, OCaml, JavaScript and F*. If you have experience with network programming and cryptography, come hack on the latest and greatest protocol and help find problems before it is finalized. If you’re planning on attending, add your name to the Hackathon wiki. If you can’t make it, but implementing cryptographic protocols is your cup of tea, apply to join the CloudFlare team!

We’re very excited about TLS 1.3, which brings both security and performance improvements to HTTPS. In fact, if you have a client that speaks TLS 1.3 draft 10, you can read this blog on our TLS 1.3 mirror: tls13.cloudflare.com.

We hope to see you there!

Che, ya estamos en Argentina! It is con placer that we announce our 32nd data center in Buenos Aires, Argentina. Our Buenos Aires data center is our 5th in Latin America following deployments in Santiago, São Paulo, Medellin, and Lima. As of this moment, CloudFlare is now mere milliseconds away from nearly all of Latin America's 300 million Internet users.

Argentina may be better known as the land of bife and malbec, but it is also home to a thriving tech community, including several well known start-up accelerators such as Startup Buenos Aires, Wayra and NXTP Labs (a CloudFlare customer!). At CloudFlare, we know a thing or two about the challenges of building a technology company, and we're proud to support the fast delivery of Internet applications for users in Argentina, as well as those who create them.

Although not commonly known, the title of the famous song from the musical Evita originates from an epitaph on a plaque honoring Evita Peron, and roughly translates as: "Don't cry for me Argentina, I remain quite near to you." Unfortunately, when it comes to the Internet, there is plenty of reason to cry (or at least sniffle), as the majority of online content consumed within Argentina (and all of Latin America) must be transported from quite far away.

Prior to our deployment in Buenos Aires, delivery of the nearly 2 million Internet applications on CloudFlare to the majority of Argentina's 35 million Internet users occurred through CloudFlare's data centers in Newark and Miami (200 and 170ms, respectively, of RTT away from Buenos Aires), with the remainder served in-region from our other data centers in Latin America. In both cases, multiple International carriers are involved in delivering traffic from our network to the ultimate end user. Also keep in mind that this issue is not CloudFlare specific. The vast majority of online content consumed in Latin America is delivered from even further away in the various geographies in which it is hosted (Europe, Asia, Oceania, etc.), with even more severe latency.

At play are two overarching, and related, dynamics. The first relates to the domicile of online content. It is estimated that upwards of 80-90% of online content accessed in Latin America is hosted outside of Latin America. This also includes locally produced content, as the cost of hosting is often less expensive in the United States and Europe. Consequently, to access online content Internet users within Latin America must travel longer distances, which means a slower Internet. This is where CloudFlare steps in allowing any individual or enterprise to easily localize their content across our global network. In regions where ISPs/networks are highly interconnected, this typically means that one or more CloudFlare's data centers is very close by. However, in regions with less local interconnection, such as in Argentina (and Latin America at large), the closest point of interconnection may be quite far away (as in the case above with traffic routing to Newark and Miami).

This is where the second dynamic comes in: interconnection. For many ISPs in Latin America, it is less expensive to purchase Internet connectivity in the United States (e.g., delivered across a submarine cable), than to purchase that same access locally. As a result, interconnection between ISPs/networks frequently occurs outside of the region, which means that content can only be accessed outside of the region (even if it is hosted locally!). Fortunately, much progress is being made to foster network interconnection locally. This progress takes the form of increased competition between providers on price and quality of service, a policy environment that recognizes the importance of local interconnection, and the development of local IXPs (Internet exchange points).

If you're on CloudFlare, your content is, as of today, available locally

It is this last development—the formation of IXPs—that is greatly facilitating the local interconnection of networks and the exchange of content. As part of our Buenos Aires deployment we've established connectivity with CABASE, an association of IXPs in Argentina. CABASE's association includes numerous interconnected IXPs throughout Argentina, allowing ISPs from Mendoza to La Plata to exchange traffic within the country. CABASE, like PTT.br (an IXP in Brazil in which CloudFlare is also a participant) is a great model for Internet connectivity in the region. Our participation in the IXP allows us to cache our customers' content locally, and exchange it with ISPs across the entire country. Say hasta luego to Newark and Miami (sorry Will Smith).

For those that read our previous post about our Düsseldorf deployment, we encouraged readers to guess our next three datacenter locations. Only one guessed Buenos Aires, but two more locations are at large. Stay tuned!

Just when you thought we’d reached the end, CloudFlare’s Latin America data center expansion continues. Hot on the heels of our recent expansion into Santiago, São Paulo, and Medellin, this holiday season commences in Lima with our 29th data center globally, and our fourth in Latin America.

Latin America is the fastest growing source of traffic to CloudFlare's network, with nearly 10x growth in just the last twelve months. Our new data center in Lima reduces the latency to access any site using CloudFlare, increases web performance for users in the region from Iquitos to Tacna, and adds another point of redundancy. It also increases the capacity and surface area of the CloudFlare network to absorb massive cyber attacks. This is of particular benefit to CloudFlare customers the Presidency of Peru and the ONPE, Peru’s National Election Office. In the lead up to the Peruvian elections this month, CloudFlare partnered with the Government of Peru to ensure that local elections go off without a hitch — no easy feat when voter turnout is expected to reach nearly 90%. Whether you are running a site, mobile app, or national election we have an offering for you.

Coming to a (new) continent near you

Despite a growing, global network of 29 data centers in 21 countries, our chamba (work) is never done. Our team of infrastructure, network, and special projects elves are currently cobbling together over 20 new data center sites over the holidays. Rest assured, the CloudFlare workshop won’t close until the security and performance benefits of CloudFlare are available to children site owners everywhere. Where will the big 3-0th be, you ask? (Hint) Let’s just say it won’t be in the North Pole...yet. Lekker!

“What’s that? CloudFlare’s 28th data center is in Medellin, Colombia!?”

With the World Cup at an end, so too is our latest round of data center expansion. Following deployments in Madrid, Milan and São Paulo, we are thrilled to announce our 28th data center in Medellin, Colombia. Most of Colombia’s 22 million Internet users are now mere milliseconds away from a CloudFlare data center.

Our deployment in Medellin is launched in partnership with Internexa, operators of the largest terrestrial communications network (IP backbone) in Latin America. Internexa operates over 28,000 km of fibre crossing seven countries in the continent. Our partnership was formed over a shared vision to build a better Internet—in this case, by localizing access to content within the region. Today, it is estimated that as much as 80% of content accessed in Latin America comes from overseas. It is with great pride that, as of now, all 2 million sites using CloudFlare are available locally over Internexa’s IP backbone. Let’s just say we’ve taken a bite out of this percentage (and latency)!

Lots of bits in Medellin

If your Internet service provider (ISP) is not connected to Internexa, fear not. We are constantly at work to improve our connectivity, and we’ve only begun our expansion throughout Latin America.

One of of our missions here at CloudFlare is to give any website owner the tools and tricks used by the Internet giants to increase the speed and security of their websites. With a few clicks of a button it is now possible to make your site fast in Colombia (and 27 other locations around the world), protect it from the largest DDoS attacks and ensure its availability 100% of the time. Que chévere!

"Chile may have scored a CloudFlare data center first, but at least we’re still in the Cup”

Brazil is home to not only the most successful national football team in history (Pentacampeão), but also to the most technologically advanced World Cup ever hosted. From vanishing foam and goal-line technology, to the biological passport and the thermally-bonded design of the Adidas Brazuca, FIFA has finally (if not begrudgingly!) entered the modern age. In honor of this great football nation, and their advance to the semi-finals, it is only fitting that we “ice the cake” with CloudFlare’s 27th data center in São Paulo.

As this year’s 32 qualifying teams will attest, the journey to Brazil wasn’t easy. To make our own journey happen we had to work with multiple hardware vendors to achieve certification from Anatel (the telecom regulator of Brazil), coordinate dozens of shipments, and patiently wait for the Receita Federal do Brasil (the Brazilian tax authority) to receive, inspect, inspect again (and again), and then release our equipment to its new home in the NAP do Brazil.

Our Prize? Not quite the US$35 million in winnings that will greet the World Cup champions, but we do get the satisfaction of increasing the performance of the 2 million+ sites using CloudFlare for Brasil’s 100 million Internet users. This launch also means that the millions of web sites and mobile apps hosted in Brazil can now use CloudFlare to increase the performance and security of their online presence both in Brazil and around the world. Se você é do Brasil, nunca houve um uma melhor oportunidade para inscrever-se na CloudFlare!

São Paulo is our second data center in Latin America following our deployment in Chile. And even though only one more data center remains in this latest round of expansion, we're just getting started. Curious to know what's next? Spoiler: If you are Colombian (we're sorry for your loss!), you won't be as disappointed after reading the next blog post. Stay tuned!

Cue up the fuegos artificiales again! Our data center in Valparaiso, Chile marks the 24th in our global network, our second south of the equator and the first in Latin America. Until now, all traffic to the Cloudflare network from the the over 600 million inhabitants in Latin America has largely been routed through our data center in Miami. If you’re in Chile or Argentina, that meant over 170ms of added latency. Realizing that Latin America is one of our fastest growing regions in terms of network traffic, we said ¡basta ya! (enough already).

Two gringos (Joshua, Special Projects & Tom, Network Engineer) and various representatives of a major carrier walk into a conference… several BGP discussions later a deal is made to bring a faster, safer Internet to Latin America. But that is only the start. Each time Cloudflare launches a new data center we must coordinate dozens of partners and vendors in multiple languages across a multitude of geographies. From procurement to production, logistics to customs clearance, multiple members of the Cloudflare team tirelessly work to expand our network and build a better Internet.

Sound like fun? If you enjoy the complexities of global supply chain management and logistics, and are interested in helping us in our global network expansion, check out our careers page. We have big plans for 2014!

Chile is but the first of several sites we have planned throughout Latin America (and the rest of the world). For those of you that can’t live without a hint, let’s just say that we hope we’ll hear a few “obrigado's” after the next one.

Finally, for those of you that don’t see an immediate performance gain, please take note that it may take a few weeks for us to fully optimize our routing in the region.