More than 20% of the web sits behind Cloudflare’s network, and our team, the Data team, owns the data pipeline responsible for plumbing that data (and more) from our global network to applicable central data centers. The Cloudflare network is a globally distributed system supporting tens of thousands of servers. Data that power Cloudflare Logs , SQL API , observability , internal analytics, and more flow through this network and use our data pipeline to serve customers.

In May of this year, we were providing data delivery at roughly two billion events per second. This includes customer traffic as well as data sent from internal teams. Year after year, we tackle the same problem — exponential traffic growth against linear hardware growth. We have to react to this increase in order to keep resource costs under control.…