Businesses today are challenged to deliver bandwidth-intensive content to end users quickly and cost-effectively. To accomplish this, many organizations are now pushing their infrastructure to the “edge” of the network, closer to customers in key markets to reduce long-haul data transmissions.
One company that is using edge networking is Cloudflare, an Internet security and performance company. Just recently, EdgeConneX® announced a partnership with Cloudflare to enable and deploy its new Cloudflare Stream service.
This large-scale Edge deployment will be distributed across 18 EdgeConneX Edge Data Centers® (EDCs) throughout Europe and North America, enabling Cloudflare to bring data within just a few milliseconds of local market end users. Cloudflare currently powers over 10 percent of all Internet requests, while also ensuring application programming interfaces (APIs), web properties and applications remain up and running at a high level.
On September 27, 2017, exactly seven years after the company’s launch, Cloudflare announced it expanded its offerings with Cloudflare Stream, a new service that combines encoding with global delivery to create a solution that streamlines business and technical issues associated with streaming video. By deploying Stream at every one of its edge nodes, Cloudflare can now offer customers the ability to integrate high quality streaming video directly into their applications.
Cloudflare also plans to launch four new services in the near future: Geo Key Manager, which gives customers granular control over where they place private keys; Unmetered Mitigation, which removes surge pricing for DDoS mitigation; Cloudflare Warp, which makes it easier to fully mask and protect an application; and Cloudflare Workers, which writes and deploys JavaScript code at the edge of the network. As part of the company’s ongoing global expansion efforts, Cloudflare is launching with EdgeConneX to provide more customers with fast and reliable web services.
“We think video streaming will be a ubiquitous component within all websites and apps in the future, and it’s our immediate goal to expand the number of companies that are streaming video from 1,000 to 100,000,” stated Matthew Prince, co-founder and CEO, Cloudflare. “Combined with EdgeConneX’s portfolio of Edge Data Centers, our technology enables a global solution across all 118 of our points of presence, for the fastest and most secure delivery of video and Internet content.”
To deploy its services, including Stream, Cloudflare is allowing customers to run basic software at global facilities located at the Edge of the network. To achieve this, Cloudflare has selected EdgeConneX to provide reliable and efficient content delivery to end users. When deploying Stream and other services in EDCs across North America and Europe, Cloudflare will utilize this massive Edge deployment to further enhance its portfolio of offerings.
Cloudflare’s performance gains from EdgeConneX EDCs have been verified by Cedexis. Their panel of Real User Measurement data showed significant improvements in response time immediately following the EdgeConneX EDC deployments 20 percent in the Portland metro area, and 33 percent in Minneapolis.
“When it comes to demonstrating the effectiveness of storing data at an EdgeConneX EDC, the numbers speak for themselves,” said Clint Heiden, chief commercial officer, EdgeConneX. “We look forward to continuing our work with Cloudflare to help them deliver a wide range of cutting-edge services to their customer base, including Cloudflare Stream.”
For more information about EdgeConneX, click here or email info@edgeconnex.com. To learn more about Cloudflare, click here.
