The backbone behind Cloudflare’s Connectivity Cloud

This post details Cloudflare's significant expansion of its global backbone network since 2021, increasing capacity by over 500% to over 330 cities in 120 countries. It explains the strategic importance of this backbone for traffic routing control, cost-effectiveness, and enabling products like Tiered Caching and Magic Transit. The post highlights the use of dark fiber and DWDM for inter-data center connectivity, and the benefits of regional backbone investments in reducing traffic tromboning and supporting data localization. It also quantifies latency improvements, showing up to 22% faster content delivery in Johannesburg due to backbone utilization.