Listo! Medellin, Colombia: CloudFlare’s 28th Data Center

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.

A data center unlike the others

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)!

If your Internet service provider (ISP) is not connected to Internexa, Continue reading

Courage to change things

This was an internal email that I sent to the CloudFlare team about how we are not afraid to throw away old code. We thought it was worth sharing with a wider audience.

Date: Thu, 10 Jul 2014 10:24:21 +0100
Subject: Courage to change things
From: John Graham-Cumming
To: Everyone

Folks,

At the Q3 planning meeting I started by making some remarks about how much
code we are changing at CloudFlare. I understand that there were audio
problems and people may not have heard these clearly, so I'm just going to
reiterate them in writing.

One of the things that CloudFlare is being brave about is looking at old code
and deciding to rewrite it. Lots of companies live with legacy code and build
on it and it eventuallybecomes a maintenance nightmare and slows the company
down.

Over the last year we've made major strides in rewriting parts of our code
base so that they are faster, more maintainable, and easier to enhance. There
are many parts of the Q3 roadmap that include replacing old parts of our
stack. This is incredibly important as it enables us to be more agile and 
more stable in future.

We should feel good  Continue reading

CloudFlare Joins Three More Peering Exchanges in Australia

In the coming weeks, connectivity to CloudFlare in Australia is going to a new level. As part of CloudFlare’s ongoing upgrades program, we established connections to three new Internet exchanges: the Megaport Internet exchanges in Sydney, Brisbane, and Melbourne. These connections doubled the number of Australian Internet exchanges we reach and marked the first exchanges outside of Sydney that Cloudflare participates in.

What is Peering?

When two ISPs peer, they agree to exchange traffic directly between each other rather than sending it a third party. By doing this, both partners avoid congested paths between transit providers, and they avoid paying to ship traffic—it's win-win!

What peering exchanges mean for CloudFlare is that we can significantly increase our service performance to users on ISPs that peer with us. Take Australia for example, for users who are currently on ISPs peering at Megaport, instead of CloudFlare sending traffic to the transit providers of those ISPs, we can now route the traffic directly to them. The result is lower latency, and traffic taking paths that are often less congested.

Low latency is crucial for internet speed due to the nature of TCP, the fundamental protocol on which the internet is built. TCP operates Continue reading