These wave machines are a new source of entropy, joining lava lamps in San Francisco, suspended rainbows in Austin, and double chaotic pendulums in London. The entropy they generate contributes to securing the Internet through LavaRand.

^{The new waves wall at Cloudflare’s Lisbon office sits beside the Radar Display of global Internet insights, with the 25th of April Bridge overlooking the Tagus River in the background.}

It’s exciting to see waves in Portugal now playing a role in keeping the Internet secure, especially given Portugal’s deep maritime history.

The installation honors Portugal’s passion for the sea and exploration of the unknown, famously beginning over 600 years ago, in 1415, with pioneering vessels like caravels and naus/carracks, precursors to galleons and other ships. Portuguese sea exploration was driven by navigation schools and historic voyages “through seas never sailed before” (“Por mares nunca dantes navegados” in Portuguese), as described by Portugal’s famous poet, Luís Vaz de Camões, born 500 years ago (1524).

Anyone familiar with Portugal knows the sea is central to its identity. The small country has 980 km of coastline, where most of its main cities are located. Maritime areas make up 90% of its territory, including the mid-Atlantic Azores. In 1998, Lisbon’s Expo 98 celebrated the oceans and this maritime heritage. Since 2011, the small town of Nazaré also became globally famous among the surfing community for its giant waves.

^{Nazaré’s waves, famous since Garrett McNamara’s 23.8 m (78 ft) ride in 2011, hold Guinness World Records for the biggest waves ever surfed. Photos: Sam Khawasé & Beatriz Paula, from Cloudflare.}

Portugal’s maritime culture also inspired literature and music, including poet Fernando Pessoa, who referenced it in his 1934 book Mensagem, and musician Rui Veloso, who dedicated his 1990s album Auto da Pimenta to Portugal’s historic connection to the sea.

As Cloudflare’s CEO, Matthew Prince, said recently, this new wall of entropy began with an idea back in 2023: “What could we use for randomness that was like our lava lamp wall in San Francisco but represented our team in Portugal?”

The original inspiration came from wave motion machine desk toys, which were popular among some of our team members. Waves and the ocean not only provide a source of movement and randomness, but also align with Portugal’s maritime history and the office’s scenic view.

However, this was easier said than done. It turns out that making a wave machine wall is a real challenge, given that these toys are not as popular as they were in the past,  and aren’t being manufactured in the size we needed any more. We scoured eBay and other sources but couldn't find enough, consistent in style and in working order wave machines. We also discovered that off-the-shelf models weren’t designed to run 24/7, which was a critical requirement for our use.

Undaunted, Cloudflare’s Places team, which ensures our offices reflect our values and culture, found a U.S.-based artisan that specializes in ocean wave displays to create the wave machines for us. Since 2009, his one-person business, Hughes Wave Motion Machines, has blended artistry, engineering, and research, following his transition from Lockheed Martin Space Systems, where he designed military and commercial satellites.

^{Timelapse of the mesmerizing office waves, set to the tune of an AI-generated song.}

Collaborating closely, we developed a custom rectangular wave machine (18 inches/45 cm long) that runs nonstop — not an easy task — which required hundreds of hours of testing and many iterations. Featuring rotating wheels, continuous motors, and a unique fluid formula, these machines create realistic ocean-like waves in green, blue, and Cloudflare’s signature orange. 

Here’s a quote from the artist himself about these wave machines:

“The machine’s design is a balancing act of matching components and their placement to how the fluid responds in a given configuration. There is a complex yet delicate relationship between viscosity, specific gravity, the size and design of the vessel, and the placement of each mechanical interface. Everything must be precisely aligned, centered around the fluid like a mathematical function. I like to say it’s akin to ’balancing a checkerboard on a beach ball in the wind.’”

^{The Cloudflare Places Team with Lisbon office architects and contractor testing wave machine placement, shelves, lighting, and mirrors to enhance movement and reflection, March 2024.}

Despite delays, the Lisbon wave machines finally debuted on March 10, 2025 — an incredibly exciting moment for the Places team.

Some numbers about our wave-machine entropy wall:

• 50 wave machines, 50 motion wheels & motors, 50 acrylic containers filled with Hughes Wave Fluid Formula (two immiscible liquids)

• 3 liquid colors: blue, green, and orange

• 15 months from concept to completion

• 14 flips (side-to-side balancing movements) per minute — over 20,000 per day

• Over 15 waves per minute

• ~0.5 liters of liquid per machine

Cloudflare’s servers handle 71 million HTTP requests per second on average, with 100 million HTTP requests per second at peak. Most of these requests are secured via TLS, which relies on secure randomness for cryptographic integrity. A Cryptographically Secure Pseudorandom Number Generator (CSPRNG) ensures unpredictability, but only when seeded with high-quality entropy. Since chaotic movement in the real world is truly random, Cloudflare designed a system to harness it. Our 2024 blog post expands on this topic in a more technical way, but here’s a quick summary.

In 2017, Cloudflare launched LavaRand, inspired by Silicon Graphics’ 1997 concept However, the need for randomness in security was already a hot topic on our blog before that, such as in our discussions of securing systems and cryptography. Originally, LavaRand collected entropy from a wall of lava lamps in our San Francisco office, feeding an internal API that servers periodically query to include in their entropy pools. Over time, we expanded LavaRand beyond lava lamps, incorporating new sources of office chaos while maintaining the same core method.

A camera captures images of dynamic, unpredictable randomness displays. Shadows, lighting changes, and even sensor noise contribute entropy. Each image is then processed into a compact hash, converting it into a sequence of random bytes. These, combined with the previous seed and local system entropy, serve as input for a Key Derivation Function (KDF), which generates a new seed for a CSPRNG — capable of producing virtually unlimited random bytes upon request. The waves in our Lisbon office are now contributing to this pool of randomness.

Cloudflare’s LavaRand API makes this randomness accessible internally, strengthening cryptographic security across our global infrastructure. For example, when you use Math.random() in Cloudflare Workers, part of that randomness comes from LavaRand. Similarly, querying our drand API taps into LavaRand as well. Cloudflare offers this API to enable anyone to generate random numbers and even seed their own systems.

^{Photo of the view from our Lisbon office, featuring ceiling lights arranged in a wave-like pattern.}

Entropy also inspired the design ethos of our new Lisbon office, given that the wall of waves and the office are part of the same project. As soon as you enter, you're greeted not only by the motion of the entropy wall but also by the constant movement of planet Earth on our Cloudflare Radar Display screen that stands next to it. But the waves don’t stop there — more elements throughout the space mimic the dynamic flow of the Internet itself. Unlike ocean tides, however, Internet traffic ebbs and flows with the motion of the Sun, not the Moon.

As you walk through the office, waves are everywhere — in the ceiling lights, the architectural contours, and even the floor plan, thoughtfully designed by our architect to reflect the fluid movement of water. The visual elements create a cohesive experience, reinforcing a sense of motion. Each meeting room embraces this maritime theme, named after famous Portuguese beaches — including, naturally, Nazaré.

We partnered with an incredible group of local Portuguese vendors for this construction project, where all the leads were women — something incredibly rare for the industry. The local teams worked with passion, proudly wore Cloudflare t-shirts, and fostered a warm, family-like atmosphere. They openly expressed pride in the project, sharing how it stood out from anything they had worked on before.

^{Our amazing third-party team and internal Places team, proudly rocking Cloudflare shirts after bringing this project to life.}

Next, we have several name options for this new wall of entropy. Help us decide the best one, and register your vote using this form.

The Surf Board

Chaos Reef

Waves of Entropy

Wall of Waves

Whirling Wave Wall

Chaotic Wave Wall

Waves of Chaos

If you’re interested in working in Cloudflare’s Lisbon office, we’re hiring! Our career page lists our open roles in Lisbon, as well as our other locations in the U.S., Mexico, Europe and Asia.

^{Acknowledgements: This project was only possible with the effort, vision and help of John Graham-Cumming, Caroline Quick, Jen Preston, Laura Atwall, Carolina Beja, Hughes Wave Motion Machines, P4 Planning and Project Management, Gensler Europe, Openbook Architecture, and Vector Mais.}

Justina Wong, Technical Support Team Lead in Lisbon, talks about what it’s like working at Cloudflare, and everything you need to know if you want to join us.

Justina joined Cloudflare about three years ago in London as a Technical Support Engineer. Currently, she’s part of their Customer Support team working in Lisbon as a team lead.

I can’t speak for others, but I love the things you can learn from the others. There are so many talented individuals who are willing and ready to teach/share. They are my inspiration and I want to become them!

Justina’s favourite Cloudflare products are firewall-related ones. The company’s primary care is for the customers and they want to make attack mitigation as easy as possible. As she puts it, “the fact that these protections are on multiple layers, like L7, L3/4, is very important, and I’m proud to be someone who can help our customers when they face certain attacks.”.

Cloudflare is constantly releasing new products to help build a better Internet, so product managers are always on top of tool updates to facilitate that. The company believes that it’s not only important to help customers from the product side, but it’s also as important to teach them how to help themselves so that they can fix their issues promptly without having to wait for an answer.

According to Justina, one of the amazing things about Cloudflare is the unified company culture. As their SVP of Engineering, Usman, said in a recent meeting with the team, “Be helpful, look around for problems and help find solutions”.

Every Cloudflare office has its own little “flare”: London’s love of mince pies; Singapore’s super fun cultural richness in one location (they have four new years in one year, officially); and Lisbon’s forever love (and fight) for pastéis de nata.

Each office also has its own function or focus, so people working at Cloudflare get to meet very diverse individuals. For Justina, the things that she'd loved the most are learning from all of the engineers in London, picking up new customer service skills in Singapore and helping to build the new Lisbon office. She says that every time she goes to a different office, they have grown at least 50% in headcount compared to when she was last there. Talk about growth!

As a hiring manager, she also says that the company is mindful of diversity.

Like everywhere else, remote work has become the current normal at Cloudflare. As someone who enjoyed being in the office, Justina says “all the countless times I just walked over to someone to ask a question, now all turned into a chat message; or the random coffee chat when we waited for our coffee to be done.”

Funnily enough, the EMEA CSUP team is working closer than before the pandemic. Previously, each office was somewhat in its own communication bubble, now it has turned into a collective conversation. This is great for getting to know colleagues during and beyond work hours.

For Cloudflare, growing the team is a continuous challenge, and Justina has never needed to do as many interviews as she has done in the Lisbon office. Although it’s a huge challenge for her, it’s also fun. Since the company is hiring aggressively despite the pandemic, their teams are eager to welcome anyone who’s ready to be part of Lisbon Cloudflare.

One of the things you can expect if you work at Cloudflare is for your manager to care and for your feedback to be heard. We know these are valuable things when considering where to work. So if you’re someone who’s willing to learn and is excited about their technologies, this call is for you. The company is expanding in different markets, so they’re looking for tech candidates who can speak multiple languages.

Currently, Cloudflare has over 25 open positions for their offices in Lisbon. Categories include Security Engineers, Full-Stack Developers, Data Scientists, and more.

It has now been more than 90 days since I joined Cloudflare’s EMEA Recruiting Team as a Recruiting Coordinator based in Lisbon. In a year filled with hardships for so many people around the world, I wanted to share my journey. I hope people will relate and feel encouraged to pursue their dreams, even during these challenging times.

When 2020 started, it was not in my plans to change jobs and start working at a new company, completely remote, without ever meeting my colleagues in person or visiting the office. However, that is exactly what happened, and I am so glad I did.

The number of interviews in the hiring process at Cloudflare may feel overwhelming for some - in my case, I met 11 people during this process. For me, I was glad to have so many chances to get to know the people I would be working with. I believe I got as much out of the conversations as the interviewers did, which is great — a recruitment process should be as much about the company getting to know you, as you getting to know the company.

A great thing about interviewing remotely is that I got the chance to talk to people all around the globe, which enriched the process and my idea of Cloudflare as a company. I started to picture myself as an actual member of the team, definitely interested in working towards a better and safer Internet. Even though there were many interviews to get through, the constant communication with the team made me feel engaged and excited. In the end, the process went by quickly, even quicker than I expected.

The best thing was the outpouring of support I received from what would be my future teammates once I accepted the offer. I felt welcomed way before my actual start date!

In all my previous companies, onboarding was done in person and small groups. I was not prepared for a fully remote experience with a class of more than 20 people, yet it was so smooth and well-coordinated that you wouldn’t believe it had been run virtually for only a few months!

My onboarding class included people from all over the world — Lisbon, Austin, Miami, Washington, London, Munich, Singapore… And not only that, but we were all starting different roles, from Customer Success to Engineering, and even Legal Counsel! This gave me the opportunity to know people I otherwise wouldn’t have had the chance to meet, and it allowed me to establish bonds early on with my colleagues. Given the current situation, knowing that people were in the same boat with me felt reassuring. I felt that we were in it together, in a way. Not only that, but I got everything I needed for work (and more — like a pair of Cloudflare socks!) delivered to my home, making the whole experience very comfortable for me.

Starting in a new role can be a daunting experience — it’s a new environment, a new team, a new project, and lots of things that could go sideways. However, there are also a lot of things that can go right!

At Cloudflare, I found an extremely welcoming, supportive team that helped me ramp up and take ownership of my work quickly and effectively. I felt so supported that I took ownership of a big project right away — Cloudflare Careers Day. Right from the start, it was clear to me that Cloudflare has ambitious goals for the growth of our Lisbon office. I thought about the ways I could help with that, and a virtual careers day seemed like a great first step to drive brand awareness and let people know we are hiring and that we are hiring! The Recruitment Team set in motion a plan to turn this idea into reality in less than three months, resulting in a successful and fun first edition of the Cloudflare Careers Day in November 2020.

Of course, there were times when I felt unsure of myself and my abilities. But this is why it is so important to be able to rely on your team. In the end, I feel I have grown a lot in just three months — not only professionally, but personally as well!

I look forward to working on more projects. I’m excited to write with this blog post, which I hope will inspire more people to take a chance, believe in themselves and just go for it! Even in these strange, stressful times, good things can and do happen, especially when you are surrounded by talented, inspiring people.

Lisbon! I am excited to help grow our Lisbon office, recruiting talented people that feel as strongly as I do about helping build a better Internet. We have many different open roles at the moment so, if you see one that suits you, take a chance and reach out. Maybe you’ll embark on a new journey, just like me.

Our Lisbon story is just beginning. I can’t wait to see all the amazing things we will accomplish in 2021, both as a team and as a company.

It's the end of the year, so we thought it would be a great time to give you an update on how we're doing and what we're planning for 2021. If you're reading this, you know we like to share everything we do at Cloudflare, including how the organization is evolving.

In July, John Graham-Cumming wrote a blog post entitled Cloudflare's first year in Lisbon. and showed how we went from an announcement, just a few months before, to an entirely bootstrapped and fully functional office. At the time, despite a ramping pandemic, the team was already hard at work doing a fantastic job scaling up and solidifying our presence here.

A few weeks later, in August, I proudly joined the team.

Cloudflare is, by any standard, a big company. There's a lot you need to learn, many people you need to get to know first, and a lot of setup steps you need to get through before you're in a position to do actual real productive work.

Joining the company during COVID was challenging. I felt just as excited as I was scared. We were (and still are) fully working from home, I didn't have a team to work with in person. A setup like this surely looks daunting, even for experienced people.

But here's the thing. Cloudflare isn’t just any company. We're unparalleled because we masterfully combine scale, ambition, talent, product, vision, values, and culture in a way that's very difficult to replicate and maintain at any other company.

We're big, but we move fast. We're over 1,600 working together, but it feels like a cohesive group. We're distributed across multiple offices and continents, often working in teams with members from different time zones, but we don't notice it. We have tools, documentation, and methodologies, but they don't get in the way of our “shipping products'' mantra. There are product owners, teams for specific features, but we all hold ownership for everyone's work.

I felt all of this right after my orientation week. The warm welcome, the regular check-ins to say hello and see how I was doing, and everyone's urge to make sure I was adjusting and getting all the help I needed, giving me advice, introducing me to other colleagues. Cloudflarians take genuine pride in making sure everyone feels at home. You can learn more about this experience from a Story Time segment John did with me.

Cloudflare Lisbon has come a long way. We now have 74 incredibly talented people working or joining in areas such as Engineering, Security, Infrastructure, Customer Support, People, Places, Product Management, Emerging Technologies or Accounting, and growing fast.

Although the pandemic didn't help our plans, especially those related to growing and physically working in our brand new office on Praça Marquês de Pombal, it didn't slow us down either. November and December alone, 15 people joined the team. We're gaining momentum.

More interestingly, we have a super diverse team in Lisbon, and we couldn't be prouder of it. We're putting action ahead of words and actively contributing to create more opportunities for women in technology and to attract people to work in Portugal regardless of their country of origin.

Our discussions on whether "Pastéis de Nata" is best served with or without cinnamon, our holiday traditions, Portuguese music, coffee, our frequent virtual Pub Quizzes, escape room events, and of course, the comments on shirtless Marcelo are now routine. They are evidence that we feel like a group working together, having fun while growing.

We live in unusual and contemplative times. Many of our emigrants living outside the country are considering returning home to Portugal and our office in Lisbon is proof of this growing movement. Portuguese returnees represent roughly 10% of our team.

The Portuguese Government has an initiative called "Programa Regressar," where they provide tax benefits and financial assistance to support emigrants and their families returning to Portugal.

While this is great, we think it's not enough. Moving you and your family to another country is a life-changing event. Although things like patriotism, cost of living, and tax incentives play an essential role in the personal decision process, skilled and talented people will also be looking for a great workplace and a meaningful, ambitious company to join.

This is where Cloudflare can help you. We can provide you the best of the two worlds. Living in a beautiful country, your home, while working in a world-class company, solving big problems at scale on a mission to help build a better Internet with a unique culture. Furthermore, we support your return, and we're ready to help you in any way we can.

Cloudflare is serious about its presence in Portugal. We're going to continue growing and investing in highly skilled talent for our Lisbon office and making it one of Cloudflare's top locations, alongside San Francisco, Austin, Singapore, and London.

Currently, we have 28 open positions in Lisbon, and you can expect new ones to open over the upcoming weeks. Some are for teams based in Lisbon, like Data Insights and Cloudflare Radar (we're doubling in 2021), while others will join different projects, some of which have teams distributed across multiple offices.

If you decide to apply, there are many resources you can use to learn about Cloudflare and improve your chances of snatching your dream job. Here are a few:

• Cloudflare Careers Day: Meet the Engineering Team with Isabel Rodrigues, Jen Langdon, and me.

• Our Blog. We share an unusual amount of information about our infrastructure and products, our technical decisions, architecture, and our approach to solving complex, large-scale technical challenges.

• Our Official GitHub Page. We have open-source encoded all over in our DNA, and we like to give back to the community whenever possible. Cloudflare has over 300 public projects that you can explore, try them yourself, or fork.

• Our Developers Website, where you can learn about our products, the way they work, their features, and APIs. Speaking of APIs, take a look at cloudflare-go and flarectl.

• Check our community Forum, ask us questions; we're always there for you, you'll be surprised. Follow us on Twitter.

• Cloudflare TV airs excellent content all the time. You can check our schedule for numerous live segments with the team and guests or re-run past segments. We also have a "Best of" archive.

• Finally, you can try our products. As part of our mission and values, we offer very generous free tiers to individual users and small startups. You can try our CDN features, DDoS, Workers (100,000 requests per day, with Workers KV included), and even Access for Teams (with Argo tunnel included, for companies or households under 50 seats), at no cost.

We're a highly ambitious, large-scale technology company with a soul. Fundamental to our mission to help build a better Internet is protecting the free and open Internet. Cloudflare powers Internet requests for ~16% of the Fortune 1,000 and serves 20 million HTTP requests per second on average.

A year ago I wrote about the opening of Cloudflare’s office in Lisbon, it’s hard to believe that a year has flown by. At the time I wrote:

Lisbon’s combination of a large and growing existing tech ecosystem, attractive immigration policy, political stability, high standard of living, as well as logistical factors like time zone (the same as the UK) and direct flights to San Francisco made it the clear winner.

We landed in Lisbon with a small team of transplants from other Cloudflare offices. Twelve of us moved from the UK, US and Singapore to bootstrap here. Today we are 35 people with another 10 having accepted offers; we’ve almost quadrupled in a year and we intend to keep growing to around 80 by the end of 2020.

If you read back to my description of why we chose Lisbon only one item hasn’t turned out quite as we expected. Sure enough TAP Portugal does have direct flights to San Francisco but the pandemic put an end to all business flying worldwide for Cloudflare. We all look forward to getting back to being able to visit our colleagues in other locations.

The pandemic also put us in the odd position of needing to move from one empty office to another. Back in January the Cloudflare Lisbon office was in the Chiado and only had capacity for about 14 people. With our rapid growth we moved, in February, to a larger, temporary location on Avenida da Liberdade which had room for about 25 people.

Leaving the Chiado‌‌

And in early April, we moved to our longer term office on Praça Marquês de Pombal. Of course, by that time the State of Emergency had been declared in Portugal and the office move took place in our absence. But it sits waiting for our return sometime in early 2021.

The team that landed in Lisbon covered Customer Support, Security, IT, Technology, and  Emerging Technology and Incubation, but, as we suspected, we’ve grown in many other departments and the rest of Cloudflare is realizing how much Lisbon and Portugal have to offer. In addition to the original team we now have people in SRE, Payroll, Accounting, Trust and Safety, People and Places, Product Management and Infrastructure.

View from the Cloudflare Lisbon office‌‌

Despite the pandemic we’re continuing to invest in Lisbon with 24 open roles in Customer Support, Infrastructure, People and Places, Engineering, Accounting and Finance, Security, Business Intelligence, Product Management and Emerging Technology and Incubation.

As I said in an interview with AICEP earlier this year “É nosso objetivo construir em Lisboa um dos maiores escritórios da Cloudflare” (“It’s our objective to build in Lisbon one of the major Cloudflare offices”). You can read the full Portuguese-language interview here. We continue to believe that Lisbon is a vital part of Cloudflare’s growth.

I’ve spent a huge amount of my career on aircraft and the last few months have felt very odd, but I couldn’t have been happier to find myself temporarily stuck in Lisbon. No doubt we’ll all be traveling again but this last year has confirmed my impression that Lisbon is a great place to live.

I asked our team what they’d found they love about living in Lisbon and Portugal. They came back with pasteis de nata, sunshine every day, the jacaranda trees, feijoada, empada de galinha, Joker, Super Bock, chocolate mousse being an everyday staple, Maria biscuits, quality fresh produce, dolphins, lizards in the gardens, MB Way, ovos moles de Aveiro, so great that only ~30/40min from here you get such nice beaches like the ones in Setubal, Sintra, Cascais, Sesimbra, bica, sardines, the Alentejo coastline, the chicken from Bonjardim, family friendliness and how nice it is to raise children here, fast, reliable and cheap Internet access, and so much more.

If you’d like to join us please visit our careers page for Lisbon.

CC BY-SA 2.0 image by Sridhar Saraf

And Cloudflare didn’t stop at London. We now have people in Munich, Singapore, Beijing, Austin, TX, Chicago and Champaign, IL, New York, Washington, DC, San Jose, CA, Miami, FL, and Sydney, Australia, as well as San Francisco and London. And today we’re announcing the establishment of a new technical hub in Lisbon, Portugal. As part of that office opening I will be relocating to Lisbon this summer along with a small number of technical folks from other Cloudflare offices.

We’re recruiting in Lisbon starting today. Go here to see all the current opportunities. We’re looking for people to fill roles in Engineering, Security, Product, Product Strategy, Technology Research, and Customer Support.

CC BY-SA 2.0 Image by Rustam Aliyev

My first real idea of Lisbon dates to 30 years ago with the 1989 publication of John Le Carré’s The Russia House. As real, of course, as any Le Carré view of the world:

[...] ten years ago on a whim Barley Blair, having inherited a stray couple of thousand from a remote aunt, bought himself a scruffy pied-a-terre in Lisbon, where he was accustomed to take periodic rests from the burden of his many-sided soul. It could have been Cornwall, it could have been Provence or Timbuktu. But Lisbon by an accident had got him [...]

Cloudflare’s choice of Lisbon, however, came not by way of an accident but a careful search for a new continental European city in which to locate a technical office. I had been invited to Lisbon back in 2014 to speak at SAPO Codebits and been impressed by the size and range of technical talent present at the event. Subsequently, we looked at 45 cities across 29 countries, narrowing down to a final list of three.

Lisbon’s combination of a large and growing existing tech ecosystem, attractive immigration policy, political stability, high standard of living, as well as logistical factors like time zone (the same as the UK) and direct flights to San Francisco made it the clear winner.

Eu comecei a aprender Português há três meses... and I’m looking forward to discovering a country and a culture, and building a new technical hub for Cloudflare. We have found a thriving local technology ecosystem, supported both by the government and a myriad of exciting startups, and we look forward to collaborating with them to continue to raise Lisbon's profile.