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> We are a relatively large customer of the facility, consuming approximately 10 percent of its total capacity. I'm surprised that CF are renting space in colo

> We are a relatively large customer of the facility, consuming approximately 10 percent of its total capacity. I'm surprised that CF are renting space in colocation facilities. I would have expected a business of their size to have their own DCs. Is this common practice for cloud providers?

NicoJuicy 3y ago
You thought that they build > 300 DC's? Colo is much more flexible, cheaper and quicker to start. Definitely since they sit close to the end-user on the data plane.
- andyjohnson0 3y ago
  > You thought that they build > 300 DC's? I have no idea how many DCs they have or operate in. Where does "300" come from? > Colo is much more flexible, cheaper and quicker to start. Definitely since they sit close to the end-user on the data plane. I understand that, but it has the disadvantage of reduced control and observability - particularly in the event of an outage such as that described in the blog post. I kind of assumed that top-tier cloud platforms like AWS/Azure/GCP operate out of dedicated DCs, and that CF are similar because of their well-known scale of operations. Since my original comment has been downvoted†, someone presumably thinks this it was a naive or trivial question - although I don't understand why. († I don't much care about downvotes, but I do take them to be a signal.)
  - martinald 3y ago
    https://www.cloudflare.com/network/ https://www.cloudflare.com/network/
  - NicoJuicy 3y ago
    Probably most of us follow Cloudflare a bit more closely. They want DC's close to every big city. I think most of us knew that they can't launch > 300 DC's in such a short amount of time. The many amount of DC's is mentioned a lot ( social networks, blogs, here). There is a distinction between eg. AWS / Azure / ... Which work with a couple of big DC's, while cloudflare operates more spread across more locations. You're comment did made me realize it may may not be that clear from an outsider viewpoint though ( fyi, I'm an outsider too)
DylanSp 3y ago
I'm a little surprised too; I figured they would have their own DCs for their core control plane servers. Colos for their 300+ PoPs makes sense, though.
vitus 3y ago
> I'm surprised that CF are renting space in colocation facilities. I would have expected a business of their size to have their own DCs. Is this common practice for cloud providers? Google for one has both. Some GCP regions [0] are in colos, while others are in places where we already had datacenters [1]. We also use colo facilities for peering (and bandwidth offload + connection termination). I'm under the impression that most AWS Cloudfront locations are also in colo facilities. [0] https://cloud.google.com/about/locations https://cloud.google.com/about/locations [1] https://www.google.com/about/datacenters/locations/ https://www.google.com/about/datacenters/locations/
jsnell 3y ago
The part you're missing is that their business is not actually that large (<$1 billion of revenue in 2022 - still deep in the red - and 3k employees).
cortesoft 3y ago
CF is probably a lot smaller than you realize, especially per data center. As someone who works at a different CDN, I am guessing they only have a few hundred machines per data center around the world. That is way too small to be able to run your own DC.

NicoJuicy 3y ago

You thought that they build > 300 DC's? Colo is much more flexible, cheaper and quicker to start. Definitely since they sit close to the end-user on the data plane.

andyjohnson0 3y ago
> You thought that they build > 300 DC's? I have no idea how many DCs they have or operate in. Where does "300" come from? > Colo is much more flexible, cheaper and quicker to start. Definitely since they sit close to the end-user on the data plane. I understand that, but it has the disadvantage of reduced control and observability - particularly in the event of an outage such as that described in the blog post. I kind of assumed that top-tier cloud platforms like AWS/Azure/GCP operate out of dedicated DCs, and that CF are similar because of their well-known scale of operations. Since my original comment has been downvoted†, someone presumably thinks this it was a naive or trivial question - although I don't understand why. († I don't much care about downvotes, but I do take them to be a signal.)
- martinald 3y ago
  https://www.cloudflare.com/network/ https://www.cloudflare.com/network/
- NicoJuicy 3y ago
  Probably most of us follow Cloudflare a bit more closely. They want DC's close to every big city. I think most of us knew that they can't launch > 300 DC's in such a short amount of time. The many amount of DC's is mentioned a lot ( social networks, blogs, here). There is a distinction between eg. AWS / Azure / ... Which work with a couple of big DC's, while cloudflare operates more spread across more locations. You're comment did made me realize it may may not be that clear from an outsider viewpoint though ( fyi, I'm an outsider too)

DylanSp 3y ago

I'm a little surprised too; I figured they would have their own DCs for their core control plane servers. Colos for their 300+ PoPs makes sense, though.

vitus 3y ago

> I'm surprised that CF are renting space in colocation facilities. I would have expected a business of their size to have their own DCs. Is this common practice for cloud providers? Google for one has both. Some GCP regions [0] are in colos, while others are in places where we already had datacenters [1]. We also use colo facilities for peering (and bandwidth offload + connection termination). I'm under the impression that most AWS Cloudfront locations are also in colo facilities. [0] https://cloud.google.com/about/locations https://cloud.google.com/about/locations [1] https://www.google.com/about/datacenters/locations/ https://www.google.com/about/datacenters/locations/

jsnell 3y ago

The part you're missing is that their business is not actually that large (<$1 billion of revenue in 2022 - still deep in the red - and 3k employees).

cortesoft 3y ago

CF is probably a lot smaller than you realize, especially per data center. As someone who works at a different CDN, I am guessing they only have a few hundred machines per data center around the world. That is way too small to be able to run your own DC.