Prague, Czech Republic: CloudFlare's 20th Data Center

On August 14, 2012, a new data center (#20) was launched in Prague, Czech Republic by Matthew Prince. This follows the recent addition of data centers in Vienna, Toronto, Seattle, Atlanta, and Sydney. The Vienna data center has been handling high traffic from Eastern Europe, which will now be partially taken over by the Prague facility to reduce load on Frankfurt and Amsterdam data centers. This move is expected to improve performance for web visitors in the Czech Republic region. The network map will soon be updated to reflect all 20 global data center locations. In addition to the Vienna data center, a new network provider was also enabled for incoming traffic. CloudFlare utilizes Anycast, which allows routers across multiple facilities to announce the same IP addresses and enables the network to choose the shortest route when transmitting data over the internet. This helps ensure that visitors reach the closest data center while also allowing better mitigation of DDoS attacks and other threats. However, managing network routing with Anycast is challenging. It requires significant effort to maintain traffic within the correct region and prevent connections from "flapping" between multiple facilities. Tom and Terry, who lead CloudFlare's network operations team, have been working diligently to ensure that as more data centers and transit providers are added, the network remains stable. Three additional data centers (two in Europe and one in Asia) are planned for launch soon.