It was just last month that we announced our network had grown to over 270 cities globally. Today, we’re announcing that with recent additions we’ve reached 275 cities. With each new city we add, we help make the Internet faster, more reliable, and more secure. In this post, we’ll talk about the cities we added, the performance increase, and look closely at our network expansion in India.

Here are the four new cities we added in the last month: Ahmedabad, India; Chandigarh, India; Jeddah, Saudi Arabia; and Yogyakarta, Indonesia.

India is home to one of the largest and most rapidly growing bases of digital consumers. Recognising this, Cloudflare has increased its footprint in India in order to optimize reachability to users within the country.

Cloudflare’s expansion in India is facilitated through interconnections with several of the largest Internet Service Providers (ISPs), mobile network providers and Internet Exchange points (IXPs). At present, we are directly connected to the major networks that account for more than 95% of the country’s broadband subscribers. We are continuously working to not only expand the interconnection capacity and locations with these networks, but also establish new connections to the networks that we have yet to interconnect with.

In 2020, we were served through seven cities in the country. Since then, we have added our network presence in another five cities, totaling to 12 cities in India. In the case of one of our biggest partners, with whom we interconnect in these 12 cities, Cloudflare’s latency performance is better in comparison to other major platforms, as shown in the chart below.

Response time (in ms) for the top network in India to Cloudflare and other platforms. Source: Cedexis

Every time we add a new location, we help make the Internet a little bit faster. The reason is every new location brings our content and services closer to the person (or machine) that requested them. Instead of driving 25 minutes to the grocery store, it’s like one opened in your neighborhood.

In the case of Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, we already have six other locations in two different cities in Saudi Arabia. Still, by adding this new location, we were able to improve median performance (TCP RTT latency) by 26% from 81ms to 60ms. 20 milliseconds doesn’t sound like a lot, right? But this location is serving almost 10 million requests per day. That’s approximately 55 hours per day that someone (or something) wasn’t waiting for data.

As we continue to put dots on the map, we’ll keep putting updates here on how Internet performance is improving. As we like to say, we’re just getting started.

If you’re an ISP that is interested in hosting a Cloudflare cache to improve performance and reduce backhaul, get in touch on our Edge Partnership Program page. And if you’re a software, data, or network engineer – or just the type of person who is curious and wants to help make the Internet better – consider joining our team.

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)

The forum kicked off with a series of presentations on the current DDoS landscape, the cyber security trends, the Serverless computing and Cloudflare’s Workers. Trey Quinn, Cloudflare Global Head of Solution Engineering, gave a brief introduction on the evolution of edge computing.

We also invited business and thought leaders across various industries to share their insights and best practices on cyber security and performance strategy. Some of the keynote and penal sessions included live demos from our customers.

At this event, the guests had gained first-hand knowledge on the latest technology. They also learned some insider tactics that will help them to protect their business, to accelerate the performance and to identify the quick-wins in a complex internet environment.

To conclude the event, we arrange some dinner for the guests to network and to enjoy a cool summer night.

Through this event, Cloudflare has strengthened the connection with the local tech community. The success of the event cannot be separated from the constant improvement from Cloudflare and the continuous support from our customers in India.

As the old saying goes, भारत महान है (India is great). India is such an important market in the region. Cloudflare will enhance the investment and engagement in providing better services and user experience for India customers.

Please join us for an exclusive gathering to discover the latest in cloud solutions for Internet Security and Performance.

Thursday, 6 June, 2019:  15:30 - 20:00

Location: the Oberoi (37-39, MG Road, Yellappa Garden, Yellappa Chetty Layout, Sivanchetti Gardens, Bengalore)

We will discuss the newest security trends and introduce serverless solutions.

We have invited renowned leaders across industries, including big brands and some of the fastest-growing startups. You will  learn the insider strategies and tactics that will help you to protect your business, to accelerate the performance and to identify the quick-wins in a complex internet environment.

Speakers:

• Vaidik Kapoor, Head of Engineering, Grofers

• Nithyanand Mehta, VP of Technical Services & GM India, Catchpoint

• Viraj Patel, VP of Technology, Bookmyshow

• Kailash Nadh, CTO, Zerodha

• Trey Guinn, Global Head of Solution Engineering, Cloudflare

Agenda:

15:30 - 16:00 - Registration and Refreshment

16:00 - 16:30 - DDoS Landscapes and Security Trends

16:30 - 17:15 - Workers Overview and Demo

17:15 - 18:00 - Panel Discussion - Best Practice on Successful Cyber Security and Performance Strategy

18:00 - 18:30 - Keynote #1 - Future edge computing

18:30 - 19:00 -  Keynote # 2 - Cyber attacks are evolving, so should you: How to adopt a quick-win security policy

19:00 - 20:00 - Happy Hour

View Event Details & Register Here »

We look forward to meeting you there!