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).
It all started in Lima
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!
¿Ahora qué?
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.