Removing uncertainty through “what-if” capacity planning

Infrastructure planning for a network serving more than 81 million requests at peak and which is globally distributed across more than 330 cities in 120+ countries is complex. The capacity planning team at Cloudflare ensures there is enough capacity in place all over the world so that our customers have one less thing to worry about - our infrastructure, which should just work. Through our processes, the team puts careful consideration into “what-ifs”. What if something unexpected happens and one of our data centers fails? What if one of our largest customers triples, or quadruples their request count?  Across a gamut of scenarios like these, the team works to understand where traffic will be served from and how the Cloudflare customer experience may change.

This blog post gives a look behind the curtain of how these scenarios are modeled at Cloudflare, and why it's so critical for our customers.

Scenario planning and our customers

Cloudflare customers rely on the data centers that Cloudflare has deployed all over the world, placing us within 50 ms of approximately 95% of the Internet-connected population globally. But round-trip time to our end users means little if those data centers don’t have the capacity Continue reading