Rewinding the Exponential: How We Keep Hardware Usage Down
Cloudflare, Tuesday, October 13th, 2026
Cloudflare's Data team explains five years of pipeline changes that deferred about two and a half years of hardware expansion.
Cloudflare's Data team runs the pipeline that moves data from its global network to central data centers, delivering roughly two billion events per second as of May.
Facing exponential traffic growth against linear hardware growth, the team has made a series of efficiency improvements over five years, including breaking up a monolithic data schema in 2022, adjusting compression in 2024 and rearchitecting pipeline replication.
Cloudflare says the changes are equivalent to deferring two and a half years of hardware expansion.