This blog post references a feature which has updated documentation. For the latest reference content, visit https://developers.cloudflare.com/workers/databases/third-party-integrations/

One of the best feelings as a developer is seeing your idea come to life. You want to move fast and Cloudflare’s developer platform gives you the tools to take your applications from 0 to 100 within minutes.

One thing that we’ve heard slows developers down is the question: “What databases can be used with Workers?”. Developers stumble when it comes to things like finding the databases that Workers can connect to, the right library or driver that's compatible with Workers and translating boilerplate examples to something that can run on our developer platform.

Today we’re announcing Database Integrations  – making it seamless to connect to your database of choice on Workers. To start, we’ve added some of the most popular databases that support HTTP connections: Neon, PlanetScale and Supabase with more (like Prisma, Fauna, MongoDB Atlas) to come!

Our serverless SQL database, D1, launched in open alpha last year, and we’re continuing to invest in making it production ready (stay tuned for an exciting update later this week!). We also recognize that there are plenty of flavours of databases, and we want developers to have the freedom to select what’s best for them and pair it with our powerful compute offering.

On our second day of this Developer Week 2023, data is in the spotlight. We’re taking huge strides in making it possible and more performant to connect to databases from Workers (spoiler alert!):

• Announcing connect() — a new API for creating TCP sockets from Cloudflare Workers

• Smart Placement speeds up applications by moving code close to your backend — no config needed

Making it possible and performant is just the start, we also want to make connecting to databases painless. Databases have specific protocols, drivers, APIs and vendor specific features that you need to understand in order to get up and running. With Database Integrations, we want to make this process foolproof.

Whether you’re working on your first project or your hundredth project, you should be able to connect to your database of choice with your eyes closed. With Database Integrations, you can spend less time focusing on configuration and more on doing what you love – building your applications!

If you’re starting a project from scratch or want to connect Workers to an existing database, you want to know “What are my options?”.

Workers supports connections to a wide array of database providers over HTTP.  With newly released outbound TCP support, the databases that you can connect to on Workers will only grow!

In the new “Integrations” tab, you’ll be able to view all the databases that we support and add the integration to your Worker directly from here. To start, we have support for Neon, PlanetScale and Supabase with many more coming soon.

You should never have to copy and paste your database credentials or other parts of the connection string.

Once you hit “Add Integration” we take you through an OAuth2 flow that automatically gets the right configuration from your database provider and adds them as encrypted environment variables to your Worker.

Once you have credentials set up, check out our documentation for examples on how to get started using the data platform’s client library. What’s more – we have templates coming that will allow you to get started even faster!

That’s it! With database integrations, you can connect your Worker with your database in just a few clicks. Head to your Worker > Settings > Integrations to try it out today.

We’ve only just scratched the surface with Database Integrations and there’s a ton more coming soon!

While we’ll be continuing to add support for more popular data platforms we also know that it's impossible for us to keep up in a moving landscape. We’ve been working on an integrations platform so that any database provider can easily build their own integration with Workers. As a developer, this means that you can start tinkering with the next new database right away on Workers.

Additionally, we’re working on adding wrangler support, so you can create integrations directly from the CLI. We’ll also be adding support for account level environment variables in order for you to share integrations across the Workers in your account.

We’re really excited about the potential here and to see all the new creations from our developers! Be sure to join Cloudflare’s Developer Discord and share your projects. Happy building!

Last CIO Week, we showed you how our network stacks up against competitors across several countries. We demonstrated with our tests that Cloudflare Access is 38% faster than ZScaler (ZPA) worldwide.

Today we wanted to focus on LATAM and show how our network performed against Zscaler and Netskope in Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Ecuador, Mexico, Peru, Uruguay and Venezuela.

With 47 data centers across Latin America and Caribbean, Cloudflare has the largest number of SASE Points of Presence across all vendors, meaning we can offer our Zero Trust services closer to the end user and reduce unwanted latency.

We’ve run a series of tests comparing our Zero Trust Network Access product against Zscaler and Netskope’s comparable products.

For each of these tests, we used 95th percentile Time to First Byte and Response tests, which measure the time it takes for a user to make a request, and get the start of the response (Time to First Byte), and the end of the response (Response). These tests were designed with the goal of trying to measure performance from an end-user perspective.

In this blog we’re going to talk about why performance matters and do a deep dive on what we’re measuring to show that we’re faster.

Performance matters because it impacts your employees' experience and their ability to get their job done. For example, if Anna is connecting to a hosted, protected application like Salesforce to complete some work, she doesn’t want to be waiting constantly for pages to load or to authenticate her requests. In an access-controlled application, the first thing you do when you connect is you log in. If that login takes a long time, you may get distracted with a random message from a coworker and even when you get authenticated, you still want your normal application experience to be snappy and smooth: users should never notice Zero Trust when it’s at its best.

If these products or experiences are slow, then something worse might happen than your users complaining: they may find ways to turn off the products or bypass them, which puts your company at risk. A Zero Trust product suite is completely ineffective if no one is using it because it’s slow.

Ensuring Zero Trust is fast is critical to the effectiveness of a Zero Trust solution: employees won’t want to turn it off and put themselves at risk if they barely know it’s there at all. Services like Zscaler or Netskope may outperform many older, antiquated solutions, but their network still fails to measure up to a highly performant, optimized network like Cloudflare’s.

Access control needs to be seamless and transparent to the user: the best compliment for a Zero Trust solution is employees barely notice it’s there. Services like Cloudflare Access and Zscaler Private Access (ZPA) allow users to cache authentication information on the provider network, ensuring applications can be accessed securely and quickly to give users that seamless experience they want. So having a network that minimizes the number of logins required while also reducing the latency of your application requests by delivering the service closer to the user will help keep your Internet experience snappy and reactive.

For these tests, Cloudflare contracted Miercom, a third party who performed a set of tests that was intended to replicate an end-user connecting to a resource protected by Cloudflare, Zscaler and Netskope. Miercom set up application instances in 14 locations around the world, and devised a test that would log into the application through various Zero Trust providers to access certain content. The test methodology is described as follows, but you can look at the full report from Miercom detailing their test methodology here:

• User connects to the application from a browser mimicked by a Catchpoint instance - new session

• User authenticates against their identity provider

• User accesses resource

• User refreshes the browser page and tries to access the same resource but with credentials already present - existing session

In this test we evaluated Cloudflare against Zscaler and Netskope accessing applications hosted in two specific regions (Brazil and the US south-west). We tested the response time for an existing session, when a user has already been authenticated and that authentication information can be cached.

Here’s how this data looks for each of the 10 countries we tested across LATAM:

When we drill into the data, we see that Cloudflare is faster when connecting from Argentina to an app hosted in Brazil. Cloudflare’s 95th percentile time to first byte times are 75% faster than Zscaler and 85% faster than Netskope.

Cloudflare is also faster when connecting from Argentina to an app hosted in the United States (South West Region). Cloudflare’s 95th percentile time to first byte times are 70% faster than Zscaler and 68% faster than Netskope:

When we drill into the data, we see that Cloudflare is faster when connecting from Brazil to an app hosted in Brazil. Cloudflare’s 95th percentile time to first byte times are 61% faster than Zscaler and 59% faster than Netskope.

Cloudflare is also faster when connecting from Brazil to an app hosted in the United States (South West Region). Cloudflare’s 95th percentile time to first byte times are 58% faster than Zscaler and 59% faster than Netskope:

When we drill into the data, we see that Cloudflare is faster when connecting from Chile to an app hosted in Brazil. Cloudflare’s 95th percentile time to first byte times are 77% faster than Zscaler and 76% faster than Netskope.

Cloudflare is also faster when connecting from Chile to an app hosted in the United States (South West Region). Cloudflare’s 95th percentile time to first byte times are 80% faster than Zscaler and 79% faster than Netskope:

When we drill into the data, we see that Cloudflare is faster when connecting from Colombia to an app hosted in Brazil. Cloudflare’s 95th percentile time to first byte times are 65% faster than Zscaler and 39% faster than Netskope.

Cloudflare is also faster when connecting from Colombia to an app hosted in the United States (South West Region). Cloudflare’s 95th percentile time to first byte times are 59% faster than Zscaler and 56% faster than Netskope:

When we drill into the data, we see that Cloudflare is faster when connecting from Costa Rica to an app hosted in Brazil. Cloudflare’s 95th percentile time to first byte times are 32% faster than Zscaler and 29% faster than Netskope.

Cloudflare is also faster when connecting from Costa Rica to an app hosted in the United States (South West Region). Cloudflare’s 95th percentile time to first byte times are 36% faster than Zscaler and 32% faster than Netskope:

When we drill into the data, we see that Cloudflare is faster when connecting from Ecuador to an app hosted in Brazil. Cloudflare’s 95th percentile time to first byte times are 48% faster than Zscaler and 43% faster than Netskope.

Cloudflare is also faster when connecting from Ecuador to an app hosted in the United States (South West Region). Cloudflare’s 95th percentile time to first byte times are 46% faster than Zscaler and 40% faster than Netskope:

When we drill into the data, we see that Cloudflare is faster when connecting from Mexico to an app hosted in Brazil. Cloudflare’s 95th percentile time to first byte times are 34% faster than Zscaler and 19% faster than Netskope.

Cloudflare is also faster when connecting from Mexico to an app hosted in the United States (South West Region). Cloudflare’s 95th percentile time to first byte times are 56% faster than Zscaler and 53% faster than Netskope:

When we drill into the data, we see that Cloudflare is faster when connecting from Peru to an app hosted in Brazil. Cloudflare’s 95th percentile time to first byte times are 79% faster than Zscaler and 74% faster than Netskope.

Cloudflare is also faster when connecting from Peru to an app hosted in the United States (South West Region). Cloudflare’s 95th percentile time to first byte times are 80% faster than Zscaler and 73% faster than Netskope:

When we drill into the data, we see that Cloudflare is faster when connecting from Uruguay to an app hosted in Brazil. Cloudflare’s 95th percentile time to first byte times are 72% faster than Zscaler and 65% faster than Netskope.

Cloudflare is also faster when connecting from Uruguay to an app hosted in the United States (South West Region). Cloudflare’s 95th percentile time to first byte times are 60% faster than Zscaler and 48% faster than Netskope:

When we drill into the data, we see that Cloudflare is faster when connecting from Venezuela to an app hosted in Brazil. Cloudflare’s 95th percentile time to first byte times are 66% faster than Zscaler and 63% faster than Netskope.

Cloudflare is also faster when connecting from Venezuela to an app hosted in the United States (South West Region). Cloudflare’s 95th percentile time to first byte times are 85% faster than Zscaler and 77% faster than Netskope:

I am excited to announce that I recently joined Cloudflare as Vice President and Managing Director for Latin America. As many of you reading this likely already know, Cloudflare is on a mission to help build a better Internet. And that’s a big part as to why I joined this team — to contribute to this in Latin America specifically and interconnect all across the world. Cloudflare has had a strong presence in Latin America for years. First investing in the region back in 2014, when it expanded its network into Latin America to be closest to the users here — to provide even faster and reliable connections without compromising security. Over the past couple of years, our reliance on the Internet has increased, and Latin America is the fourth largest region in terms of online users globally. You can see how this makes Cloudflare’s mission even more important and presents a significant opportunity in Latin America.

Being in the IT industry for two decades, this has shown me the profound impact of technology on everyone's lives. Working within technology for years and seeing the industry evolve, with other companies that have been part of fueling my desire to deliver impactful results, I have already seen the impact Cloudflare has had at a massive scale, including in Latin America. Our further commitment to what's to come in the region excites me. Not only in the business world with digital transitions, but also in promoting a better Latin America through the power of a more secure, performant, and reliable Internet!

Prior to joining Cloudflare, I was director of the Small Business and Commercial Segments for Cisco Latin America, where I directed an international team, leading sales and the business development efforts by digitizing the operational processes, sales cycle, and go-to-market strategy to drive scale within the SMB market. During my career I also have had the privilege to manage Segments Sales (Enterprise, Public Sector), Product Sales Specialists Teams, and business unit organizations in Security, Collaboration, Data Center, and Enterprise Networking.

My personal mission has always been expanding into new markets, building new organizations, and developing talent to drive incremental growth to gain market share — and more importantly, to deliver value to customers. I actually started my career working for Lucent Technologies’ Bell Labs mostly building new products and helping propel innovation. That was the first time I learned the power of technology, and its impact not just in business but in transforming lives.

Today, we are living in a very digital world, where all companies, industries, and countries are being transformed by the power of technology. At Cloudflare, I see a great opportunity to make a big impact, and in supporting Latin American countries. By taking advantage of this digital transformation, organizations of all sizes in the region can become even more productive with the technologies that are now available for industries and businesses of all types! Again, Cloudflare’s mission, to help build a better Internet, is key to why I decided to join. It all circles back to this. The inspiration and energy behind this mission is something you see in the entire team here from the get go. I have certainly seen this reflected in the work Cloudflare has already done in Latin America, but there’s a lot more we’re looking forward to. We are in a unique position to deliver significant value to customers and to millions of people in Latin America and beyond.

It's often been said that Latin America has been slow to adopt digital models, compared to the United States, Europe, and some countries in Asia. The shift to the cloud has just begun. Businesses are starting to move from on-premise technologies to the cloud, and many organizations are leveraging a multi-cloud environment as the platform to help propel them.

Cloudflare is in an unparalleled position to help transform the way Latin American companies do business and make that shift. We have seen this, in helping power many organizations in the region already, from customers like El Universal, to financial services like Bidu, Bitso, and Naranja, as well as retailers like Facily, and Falabella. This includes thousands of other Latin American customers of all sizes and types. We are also in partnership with a number of organizations to extend our services even further in the region, through Alestra, Cipher, NeoSecure, SYNNEX, TIVIT, and more.

By providing security, enhancing the performance of business-critical applications, and eliminating the cost and complexity of managing individual hardware — there are no tradeoffs for organizations, with this all within Cloudflare’s global cloud infrastructure and services. To give a sense of impact in the region, on average we block nearly seven billion cyber attacks every single day in Latin America. That’s something we’re very proud of especially as we see these threats developing.

When it comes to speed and reliability, with Cloudflare’s direct connections to more service and cloud providers, our network can reach 95% of the world’s population within 50 milliseconds (the blink of an eye is 300-400 milliseconds!). Cloudflare’s network is one of the most interconnected and also the largest networks in the world — already spanning more than 270 cities globally and this includes about 40 in Latin America. Being closest in proximity to Latin American users and organizations enables even more speed and reliable connections not only within Latin America, but also in and out of the region to anywhere else in the world.

I am very much looking forward to making an impact first hand to even more customers, partners, and users in Latin America.

Through the power of technology and innovation, let’s accelerate Latin America’s digital transformation! Let's contribute to having a faster, more secure, and more reliable Internet in the region. I know a better Internet can be key to transforming Latin America and igniting productivity.

If you are interested in partnering with us, or would like to explore how we can help ensure your organization’s Internet properties are secure, fast, and reliable — reach out to me, ctorales@cloudflare.com anytime. Also, we are hiring, and I’m helping grow our team! If you are interested in embarking on an ambitious mission to help build a better Internet, check out our open positions.

¡Mexicanos! ¡Viva México! ¡Viva México! ¡Viva México! No, no es el 16 de septiembre (Día de la Independencia de México). Sin embargo aquí en Cloudflare celebramos la introducción de nuestro Datacenter #134 en la Ciudad De México. Este Datacenter marca nuestra entrada en la nación Azteca. Anteriormente el tráfico de México era servido desde algunos de nuestros otros Datacenters (principalmente McAllen, TX, Dallas, TX y Los Angeles, CA).

Mexicans! Long Live Mexico! Long Live Mexico! Long Live Mexico! No, its not the 16th of September (Mexico Independence Day). However at Cloudflare we are proud to introduce our Datacenter #134 located in Mexico City Mexico. This data center marks our entrance into the Aztec Nation. Prior to this, traffic to Mexico was served from some of our other datacenters (Primarily Mcallen, TX, Dallas, TX and Los Angeles, CA).

El área metropolitana de México cuenta con mas de 21 millones de habitantes quienes desde hoy podrán difrutar más rápido acesso a más de 7 millones de Sitios y aplicaciones en Internet servidos por Cloudflare. Este sera nuestro décimo centro de datos en la region de América Latina y El Caribe.

The Mexico City Metropolitan Areas have more than 21 million inhabitants, who from today will enjoy faster access to more than 7 million websites which are served and accelerated by Cloudflare. This is our 10th Datacenter in the Latin America Region.

CC BY-NC 2.0 image by kevin53

Para nuestro despliegue en México agradecemos a Kio Networks. Adicionalmente muy pronto estaremos interconectando con el IXP México. Si usted vive en Guadalajara, Monterrey o Queretaro esten al pendiente que tendremos buenas noticias para ustedes tambien.

For this deployment we would like to thank our partner from Kio Networks and we will also be interconnecting to the Mexico IXP If you live in Guadalajara, Monterrey or Queretaro, stay tuned more great news coming your way

El equipo de Cloudflare de América Latina estará presente en el evento E-Retail Day el 15 de marzo en el Sheraton Maria Isabel Hotel. Les invitamos a asistir y platicar con nuestro equipo.

The Cloudflare Latin America Team will be present in Mexico City for the E-Retail Day Event the 15 of March at the Sheraton Maria Isabel Hotel. We invite you to attend and chat with our team.

This map reflects the network as of the publish date of this blog post. For the most up to date directory of locations please refer to our Network Map on the Cloudflare site.

A Cloudflare está muito feliz de anunciar o nosso mais recente data center: Rio de Janeiro, Brasil. Este é o nosso oitavo data center na América do Sul, e com ele a rede da Cloudflare se expande por 116 cidades em 57 países. Este lançamento vai acelerar e proteger mais de seis milhões de sites e aplicações web pelo Brasil, também provendo redundância para o nosso data center em São Paulo. Provendo acesso à nossa rede para mais parceiros através do Ponto de Troca de Tráfego (IX-RJ), nós estamos chegando mais perto dos usuários da Internet em todo o Brasil.

Rio de Janeiro plays a great role in the history of Internet in Brazil. In 1988, the National Laboratory of Scientific Computation, headquartered in Rio de Janeiro connected to the University of Maryland via Bitnet, a network to exchange messages. The next year, the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro also connected to Bitnet, becoming the third institution (with São Paulo State Foundation for Research Support) to have access to this technology.

O Rio de janeiro tem papel central na história da Internet no Brasil. Em 1988, o Laboratório Nacional de Computação Científica (LNCC), conectou-se à Universidade de Mariland através da Bitnet, que era uma rede que permitia o envio de e-mail entre as instituições acadêmicas. Em 1989, a Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro também se conectou na Bitnet através de outra universidade americana, se tornando a terceira instituição Brasileira a se conectar na Internet (a FAPESP também já estava na rede).

_CC BY-NC 2.0 image by Lau Rey_

Today, the city of Rio de Janeiro is very well connected. Internet access can be found all over, and better connectivity can boost entrepreneurship. In some Favelas (slums), the residents are creating their own ISPs, providing Internet access to some users that big ISPs are not able to reach.

Hoje, a cidade do Rio de Janeiro é muito bem conectada. Acesso à internet pode ser encontrado em todo lugar, inclusive incentivando o empreendedorismo. Em algumas favelas os próprios moradores criaram seus provedores de internet via Wi-Fi, e estão proporcionando a inclusão digital em áreas onde os grandes provedores não chegam.

We have an additional eight datacenters in progress across Latin America. If managing the many moving parts of building a large global network interest you, come join our team!

Nós temos mais oito datacenters a caminho na América Latina. Se você se interessa em gerenciar uma rede de alcance global, venha fazer parte do nosso time!

-The Cloudflare team

This downtime was the result of a BGP route leak by Internexa, an ISP in Latin America. Internexa accidentally directed large amounts of traffic destined for CloudFlare data centers around the world to a single data center in Medellín, Colombia. At the same time Internexa also leaked routes belonging to Telecom Argentina causing disruption in Argentina. This was the result of Internexa announcing via BGP that their network, instead of ours, handled traffic for CloudFlare. This miscommunication caused a flood of traffic to quickly overwhelm the data center in Medellín. The incident lasted 49 minutes, from 15:08UTC to 15:57UTC.

The exact impact of the route leak to our customers’ visitors depended on the geography of the Internet. Traffic to CloudFlare’s customers sites dropped by 50% in North America and 12% in Europe. The impact on our network in Asia was isolated to China. Traffic from South America was also affected as data centers there had to cope with an influx of traffic normally handled elsewhere.

In the past, we’ve written about the inherent fragility of the Internet’s core routing system, and the problem of “route leakage”. Throughout 2014, we’ve seen numerous high profile leaks. In April an Indonesian ISP leaked routes for large swathes of the Internet for a two hour period. Then in September portions of the Internet went offline because of a route leak when a hosting company leaked 400,000 routes, and back in March Google’s DNS was inaccessible in parts of the world because of a route leak. Route leakage is a hard problem that impacts every Internet service provider with no obvious or quick solution.

Today’s incident was unrelated to our recent announcement of Universal SSL, and was not the result of an attack. We worked directly with Internexa to resolve the route leak, and all CloudFlare systems are now operating normally. For the time being, we have quarantined the Medellín data center and disabled connectivity with Internexa. CloudFlare still has plenty of capacity to continue operating our network without that data center while we work with Internexa to understand the exact cause of their route leak. We are beginning an internal post-mortem to ensure that our internal protocols were followed and to identify areas for improvement.

Finally, we plan to proactively issue service credits to accounts covered by SLAs. Any amount of downtime is completely unacceptable to us. The entire CloudFlare team remains focused on delivering the best service to customers worldwide.