Cloudflare Global Network Spans 137 Cities: Launching Durban and Port Louis Data Centers
by Nitin Rao
Our newest data centers in Durban (South Africa) and Port Louis (Mauritius) expand the Cloudflare network to 137 cities globally. We are delighted to reach this special milestone, and even more excited to help improve the performance and security of over 7 million Internet properties (and growing!) across 69 countries.
Just in March, so far, we’ve launched new data centers across Beirut, Phnom Penh, Kathmandu, Istanbul, Reykjavík, Riyadh, Macau, Baghdad, Houston, Indianapolis, Montgomery, Pittsburgh, Sacramento, Mexico City and Tel Aviv!
Growing Africa network
Just three years (and about 100 cities ago!), we launched our very first Africa deployment in Johannesburg (South Africa). It was an exciting day for members of our team to facilitate an especially substantial latency improvement for our customers.
Since then, we’ve turned up additional deployments in Cairo (Egypt), Cape Town (South Africa), Djibouti (Djibouti), Luanda (Angola), and Mombasa (Kenya).
Durban is our third deployment in South Africa, where mobile adoption continues to drive traffic growth amongst 20 million Internet users. Other countries with three (or more) Cloudflare data centers are Australia, Canada, China, Germany and United States (with two European states joining this list very soon!). In addition to better serving KwaZulu-Natal, our Durban data center will provide additional redundancy and expand the surface area for Cloudflare to withstand potential DDoS attacks. We are participants at two interconnection points: NAP Africa IX Durban and DINX (Durban Internet Exchange).
Port Louis (Mauritius), which used to be served out of our Mombasa data center, will see the latency-equivalent of 1,500 miles shaved off on every web request. Mauritius welcomes 1.3 million visitors from world over to experience the idyllic island — as many visitors as the local population! Even if you’re traveling on vacation (and choose to go online!), we’d love to ensure that you access a Cloudflare data center close to you. The reduction in latency and improvement in availability result in higher throughput to visitors. We do already do more traffic to Port Louis today than we did from Johannesburg in late 2014.
Several additional Africa data centers are actively in the works, with many expected to go live in the second half of 2018. We are especially keen to partner with ISPs in Central and West Africa, including in countries such as Nigeria, where four of the ten most popular Internet properties are protected by Cloudflare.
Even More Cities!
Correctly guess at least five of the upcoming cities being turned up in March, and we’ll send you some Cloudflare gear.
Originally published at blog.cloudflare.com on March 20, 2018.
