Five fun facts:
Cape Town is where the Atlantic Ocean and the Indian Ocean meet deep in the Southern Hemisphere.
The city is the start of the Garden Route, a 185 mile (300 km) glorious coastal drive brimming with native flowers and stunning vistas.
Cape Town is the gateway into the Stellenbosch and Franschhoek wine districts that make for very popular weekend excursions.
The imposing Table Mountain can be seen from most of Cape Town. When you take the cable car to the top of the mountain, the view from up there is even more stunning.
Cape Town is where Cloudflare has placed its 113th data center.
Second data center in South Africa
Back in December 2014, Cloudflare opened our first data center in Africa and our 30th datacenter globally. That was in Johannesburg, which has since seen over 10x growth in traffic delivered to South Africa and surrounding countries.
Now, we are expanding into our second city in South Africa — Cape Town, bringing us 870 miles (1,400km) closer to millions of Internet users. Only 15% smaller than Johannesburg by population, Cape Town commands a majority of the tourism business for the country.
For Cloudflare, our newest deployment reinforces our commitment to helping build a better Internet in South Africa and Southern Africa as a whole. Expanding on our existing peering at the JINX and NAPAfrica Internet exchanges in Johannesburg, we are now also a member at NAPAfrica Cape Town. As we enable the interconnections with in-country hosts and ISPs, we will distribute and optimize traffic delivery, while providing in-country redundancy for millions of Internet properties.
Cloudflare now operates six data centers across Africa. Cape Town joins existing facilities in Cairo (Egypt), Luanda (Angola), Mombasa (Kenya), Djibouti (Djibouti), and Johannesburg (South Africa).
Cape Town and Johannesburg equally served
In the graph below, Gauteng is the province containing Johannesburg and the nation's capital Pretoria, whereas the Western Cape province includes Cape Town and the aforementioned wine districts. With the second data center now operational in South Africa, we are seeing near equivalent performance over both major cities.
Latency (ms) decreases to Cloudflare customers. Source: Cedexis
Two More Cities
Colombo and Cape Town are the first two of four data centers going live this week. Our next two deployments, yet to be revealed, will provide additional redundancy to existing facilities in North America. Can you guess the cities they are in?