Getting to the Core: Benchmarking Cloudflare’s Latest Server Hardware

Cloudflare has redesigned its Core server fleet hardware to improve efficiency and lower complexity. The company designed two major server variants: Core Compute 2020, an AMD-based server for analytics and general-purpose compute paired with solid-state storage drives; and Core Storage 2020, an Intel-based server with twelve spinning disks to run database workloads. The new servers leverage learnings from the Gen X edge servers and have seen significant performance improvements in both synthetic benchmarking outside production and in the production workloads tested. This will allow Cloudflare to run the same workloads on fewer servers, saving CapEx costs and data center rack space.