Going back to David’s post, edge caching, in particular, while useful for static content hosted which is generally consumed (e.g. video) does not help with most Cloud applications. Cloud applications largely require two-way sending and receiving of data, so if we are to see more businesses being able to run interactive applications on the Cloud, more local POPs are required which carry the full application stack. For example, while your Google Photos viewing may be cached, for someone to upload the photos – you still have to upload them to a datacenter in Europe. In David Weekly’s tests – Google and Apple content is actually served off a local edge cache in Nairobi, however that does not serve DNS traffic for example from Google’s famous 8.8.8.8 IP address which is interactive (send-receive). Another tricky problem is if people use 8.8.8.8 – a CDN provider such as Akamai will see your request as coming from Europe, and will serve the request out of a European datacenter as opposed to the node in Nairobi.
CloudFlare will be rolling out edge hardware in Africa this year to address the latency problem. We will also be rolling out DNS in Africa as well so that DNS queries will not need to leave the continent (or even country in many cases).
For dynamic content we will be supporting our Railgun technology to help alleviate the backhaul latency from these edge machines to origin servers.
These problems are solvable and Africa has not been forgotten (at least by us). We have many clients in Africa and, of course, many people accessing CloudFlare managed sites from African countries.
> Another tricky problem is if people use 8.8.8.8 – a CDN provider such as Akamai will see your request as coming from Europe, and will serve the request out of a European datacenter as opposed to the node in Nairobi.
Correct. EDNS0 is useful, but CloudFlare doesn't need to rely on that. A name like news.ycombinator.com resolves to the same IP address wherever you are in the world. We then route that IP address depending on the location of the user using BGP Anycast. This the 8.8.8.8 problem is irrelevant for us (might not be for legacy providers).
It looks like Google Global Caches and other edge caching is proxying everything including the DNS queries in Europe, so what's returned is the proxy's IP, which, of course, points to Europe.
I think I remember the time CloudFlare came to Johannesburg sometime last year. Lots of sites had very dramatic speed boosts.
Also, latency came down to 80ms which is a huge deal. With ADSL it is sub 20ms. Of the major websites, it was only Google that was local at that point.
We are currently already rolled out in South Africa and will be adding PoPs in two locations in North Africa, and one each in East Africa and West Africa.
The idea is to get good latency coverage across African countries. Once we are rolled out in all those locations we'll be looking at latencies from specific countries to see where we should be adding extra PoPs. The actual locations of our PoPs depends partly on the political geography and partly on the Internet geography. Our goal is minimal latency for maximum population. For example, it might not make sense to have (hypothetical here) a PoP in Ouagadougou if the Internet connectivity to Accra is fantastic, but despite the relative proximity it might turn out that a PoP in Abuja is better than trying to serve Nigeria from Ghana. We'll monitor performance see where we should be.
Thanks for the clarification, and the link. I'm from Zimbabwe, i guess due to our political geography we can wave goodbye to any dreams of a PoP here, lol.
CloudFlare will be rolling out edge hardware in Africa this year to address the latency problem. We will also be rolling out DNS in Africa as well so that DNS queries will not need to leave the continent (or even country in many cases).
For dynamic content we will be supporting our Railgun technology to help alleviate the backhaul latency from these edge machines to origin servers.
These problems are solvable and Africa has not been forgotten (at least by us). We have many clients in Africa and, of course, many people accessing CloudFlare managed sites from African countries.