Portland (Oregon): Cloudflare’s 117th Data Center!

by Nitin Rao

Even as the luckiest amongst us across the US West Coast dashed off to Oregon to be closer to the solar eclipse path of totality, Cloudflare engineers were busy turning up our newest data center in Portland.

This deployment serves as our 27th data center in North America alone, and our 117th globally. It also provides additional redundancy to our Seattle and San Jose data centers, while increasing our capacity to run services and fight growing attacks.

Special History

The Silicon Forest corridor around Portland holds a special place in the hearts of the Cloudflare team. It is both new (by way of our latest edge deployment bringing us closer to millions of Oregon Internet users), and familiar (since we have had an internal data center in this region for many years, enabling services such as analytics and enterprise logs).

The greater Portland area has played a pivotal area in building high-technology products from companies such as Tektronix (test and measurement equipment), Mentor Graphics (electronic design automation) and Intel (with nearly 20,000 employees across Oregon).

Expanding the edge

At our Portland data center, we locally interconnect with ISPs such as Comcast (into their regional area networks such as Beaverton and Troutdale), and also to the Northwest Access Exchange (a volunteer non-profit internet exchange fostering peering).

This is part of a much broader expansion, as we are actively working on at least a dozen additional data centers within North America alone, and over 50 new cities around the world. If managing the moving parts of building a large global network sounds interesting, come join us!

Originally published at blog.cloudflare.com on September 1, 2017.