Cloudflare Backbone: A Fast Lane on the Busy Internet Highway

What this post added

This post details the construction and benefits of Cloudflare's dedicated backbone network, comprising long-distance and metro fiber optic cables connecting data centers globally. It explains how this backbone provides guaranteed network capacity and consistent latency, enabling faster and more reliable packet routing. The post includes a real-world test demonstrating performance improvements, showing an average response time reduction of 31% for requests from São Paulo and 44% from Tokyo when using the backbone compared to the public internet. It also highlights the integration of the backbone with dynamic routing technologies like Argo Smart Routing, Argo Tiered Caching, WARP+, and Orpheus to optimize route selection.