A bigger footprint in a difficult year

Cloudflare’s network now spans 206 cities in more than 100 countries. So far in 2020, the company has completed over 40 datacenter expansion projects and added more than 1Tbps of dedicated backbone capacity between major data centers.

The expansions came despite supply chain and operational disruption from the COVID-19 pandemic. With most passenger flights grounded by April and belly cargo capacity down 74% year-over-year, the company leaned on logistics partners already involved in medical equipment distribution. One partner, Expeditors, secured space on converted passenger aircraft operating as freight-only flights from Taipei.

Six new cities, five new countries

Each new site represents a partnership with a local ISP, extending Cloudflare’s edge compute capabilities and bringing content closer to end-users. The six cities turned up this year include five new countries for the network:

  • Vientiane, Laos — Cloudflare’s first datacenter in Laos, a country where 4G LTE launched only in 2015. Internet users there grew from under 6,000 in 2000 to over 1,000,000 by that launch.
  • Tegucigalpa, Honduras — The capital and most populated city, and Cloudflare’s first in-country presence. Active Internet users stand at 41% of the population, the lowest in Central America.
  • Johor Bahru, Malaysia — The second-largest city in Malaysia and the company’s second site there. The datacenter participates in the Johor Bahru Internet Exchange (JBIX), Malaysia’s second IX. Deployment partners installed and provisioned the site during the early stages of nationwide COVID-19 lockdowns.
  • Monrovia, Liberia — Cloudflare’s 15th datacenter in Africa. The capital accounts for roughly one-third of Liberia’s population.
  • Bandar Seri Begawan, Brunei — Brunei is the second-smallest country in Southeast Asia by land area and the smallest by population, yet ranks 4th worldwide for share of social media users at 94% of the population.
  • Paramaribo, Suriname — One of the smallest countries in South America, with 80% rainforest cover. Some 70% of the population lives in two urban districts that make up 0.5% of the land.
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A personal milestone in Suriname

For one member of the infrastructure team, the Paramaribo site is especially significant. After their family immigrated to the United States more than 30 years ago, staying in touch with relatives back home was difficult. Even with modern social media, reliable Internet access remains a challenge in many parts of the world—Suriname included, where families long depended on wireless carriers for connectivity.

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Physical distance between users and hosted content was a central problem. By partnering with an in-country ISP, Cloudflare shortens that distance and improves performance and reliability for local users, a benefit the team member says their Surinamese family is eager to see.

Hiring through the lockdown

The company says network growth will continue through the rest of the year, and it is hiring with fully remote onboarding for both full-time roles and internships.