At present there are challenges at OSI layer 1 getting data into/out of Cuba, not including any government regulation/interference, just due to the lack of pipes. There's a fiber cable to Venezuela, but VZ is not very well connected internationally and there's significant challenges with any US company trying to acquire a circuit on that path (do you want to build a POP in Caracas, with what's going on there right now?)
Dangerous? Of course. Where would the fun be if it wasn't.
Why though?
Cloudflare doesn't have POP's in most countries, and Cuba isn't somehow very advantageous compared to having a POP in Puerto Rico, Florida, Mexico, or any of the more connected Caribbean nations.
Is it for the novelty, or am I missing some advantage of setting up infrastructure in Cuba... ?
Seems safe to assume that most Cuban users will be accessing US or EU websites. Caching in Cuba, especially for large media content, will make the same amount of international bandwidth cover more users. (The latency between Havana and Miami isn't much, true.)
At some point, assuming more liberalization, there will be more Cuban websites; if those sites use a cache like CloudFlare it will be faster for international visitors, including expat Cubans.
It's at worst a no-op for Cubans, but probably provides some benefit, increasing over time. If a private company is going to pay for it, I don't see what's wrong with it.
(There's already a Miami POP; I'm not sure what Cuban routing is like but I suspect they have a lot of non-US terminating transit for political reasons, which will probably change with time...)
As to why CloudFlare would want to do it: I'm sure there's a novelty/marketing aspect to it. It's also a feel-good thing for employees and the world -- the Cuban situation has been sad, even if you agree with the embargo policy, and doing something to improve the lives of Cubans is awesome. Plus, Cuba is (hopefully) going to rapidly rejoin the world economy, so it will make increasing commercial sense. But you'd have to ask eastdakota/jgrahamc why they want to do it.
Cloudflare being in Cuba or not will have zero impact on this... unless Cloudflare is getting into the last-mile business (doubtful, but possible).
> As local access gets liberalized (which seems inevitable)
Inevitable, probably, but in 1 year's time - unlikely.
> Caching in Cuba, especially for large media content, will make the same amount of international bandwidth cover more users
This could be the only tangible benefit - except Cloudfare isn't a "nation level" cache, they're a glorified CDN with only some content being "opted-in" to using Cloudflare. So the actual benefit will be minimal (unless Cloudlfare decides to cache all inbound content for the entire nation... which seems unlikely).
> there will be more Cuban websites; if those sites use a cache like CloudFlare it will be faster for international visitors
Cloudflare doesn't need to be in Cuba for this to happen. Frankly, Cloudflare needs to _not_ be in Cuba for this to happen, otherwise it would be no different than a regular hosted server in Cuba (for in-country traffic that is).
> Plus, Cuba is (hopefully) going to rapidly rejoin the world economy,
Cuba never left the world economy -- only the American economy.
Cloudflare isn't an ISP, so Cloudflare putting a PoP in Cuba literally provides zero benefits to Cuba (and it's heavily questionable whether it would provide any benefits to Cloudflare either).
Sure, some money will be exchanged, but it's very likely the data center Cloudflare would colo at would be foreign owned and operated (since Cuba obviously lacks this infrastructure and expertise to build such an infrastructure, let alone maintain one).
> As to why CloudFlare would want to do it: I'm sure there's a novelty/marketing aspect to it
That seems to be the only logical conclusion.
Look, I'm a paying customer and love Cloudflare's service. It made a huge difference for my company's website. But it seems the comment that started this wasn't thoroughly thought through.
For web sites that Cloudflare does cache its assets, the latency of downloading those assets will certainly improve. Similarly, being able to establish an https connection on Cuban soil will be a win for customers given they are likely going to be hitting web servers thousands of miles away.
Cuba has 1/4 of the population of the Caribbean in one relatively small location.
Look at their network map [1] and you see they already cover major locations in South America, and has good coverage of the US, but Central America, Mexico and the Caribbean is a blan spot.
Looking at their worldwide location, my guess is that they pick their POPs largely based on whether they see a potential for cutting latency for their customers based on a mix of population size and the local transit situation.
In the US, it's relatively sparse. Probably because you don't gain much by increasing the number, as you can solve most latency issues within the US by buying more expensive transit from established backbone providers or peering directly with major ISPs at a relatively low number of peering points.
So lots of POPs == either high population or shitty latency over the regular network coupled with poor peering opportunities or other ways of cutting latency without putting actual servers in a rack. Or both.
Cuba is interesting - as someone has pointed out elsewhere in this thread, the plane traffic between the US and Cuba is quite substantial despite the travel limitations, because of the large Cuban exile community.
If Cuba liberalises network connections, chances are that despite the small current number of Cuban internet users, it would explode quickly, and that there would be a lot of US based businesses that might look to Cloudflare if Cloudflare could cut their latency.
Given the size of the Cuban population, it wouldn't take a large proportion of the population to make it the best contender for a first POP in the Caribbean.
My guess is that Cloudflare is looking to add a lot more POPs over the next few years anyway (EDIT: Supported by finding an announced from when they set up a POP in Kuala Lumpur: In September 2015 that was their 45th POP; today their map shows 83; if they add POPs at the same rate or faster until 2017, they'll be past running out of locations more suitable than a liberalised Cuba), and if you look at the empty spots on the map, and mark those areas with high population density and poor peering situation, I'd not at all be surprised if Cuba start looking quite good in the "if just they fix these couple of issues" (from the point of view of putting a POP in - I'm not trying to trivialise their problems) category.
It does seem like a Cloudflare PoP in Cuba is merely for the novelty.
In the US the benefits of the connected network initially reached only the US DoD and its partners. Then university communities. Then early tech companies. Then everyone.
Yes, but as a paying Cloudflare customer, I'd much rather Cloudflare spend their/my money tangibly improving their service, not propping up a small nation's economy in some sort of idealistic hope that better things will follow.
From my understanding, and from the article's description, most Cubans simply don't have easy access to the internet, or in some cases, no access at all. So putting in data centers which will primarily service foreign corporations seems very imperialistic as well as opportunistic (cheap land, cheap labor, etc).
They need last-mile carriers more than anything, and even though ISP's generally terminate at a data center, there's a whole lot that must happen first before Cubans will feel any benefits.
So, Cloudflare adding a PoP in Cuba by 2017 seems to have zero benefits, for anyone really. Even after Cloudflare does setup a PoP, the benefits to Cubans are minimal-to-none.
Perhaps if Cloudflare is simply itching to burn extra money, they could instead consider lowering the price of their business tier - making it immediately more accessible for more companies. This brings SSL to more sites, protects them from attacks, and can in some cases dramatically improve performance. Those a tangible benefits for the entire internet.
But the success of things like in this article shows that there are a lot of desire for access, which means that once internet connectivity is liberalised and prices tumble, there is likely to be a large demand quite quickly. Yet from a population that is not likely to be able to pay for large upgrades to external links very quickly.
That's an ideal scenario for Cloudflare, in that you'll have demand from Spanish-language businesses outside Cuba to reach a market that once the floodgates opens is likely to grow very rapidly, especially due to the sheer amount of people in the US with connections to the island. If you can broker reduced latency, it will be a big competitive factor for Spanish language businesses that wants to target Cuba but doesn't want to put servers locally.
So don't worry. I doubt Cloudflare is hoping to burn your money to make a political statement (though who knows, it might very well pay for itself in PR), but rather is looking at it in terms of actual business potential.
Also, I don't know what the minimum size of a Cloudflare pop is. Unless they've said something (I haven't looked), for what we know the minimum they need is to be able to rent a 1U slot for a server in a suitably well connected data centre for smaller locations.
I've worked at places where "setting up a POP" meant exactly that, and I've worked at places that insisted on setting up $2 million monstrosities in custom built racks no matter how small the local market was. Unsurprisingly, the latter company went bankrupt.
No, any website (unless blocked by a nation-state) is by default accessible globally.
Yes, Cloudflare's CDN offers increased performance for global visitors, but with so few people online in Cuba, there's very little sense in fronting the cost of building all this infrastructure just to have a Cloudflare PoP there. There's many other nations much larger and better connected that CloudFlare does not have a PoP in, so why pick Cuba?
Cubans have bigger concerns than getting a page to load a few milliseconds faster. Getting online in the first place might be a bigger concern for starters...
As a customer, I don't see why you think you have the right to nit-pick about how they go about this or where global reach needs to be improved (which new endpoints to open). You pay your money and they decide which countries to spend it on.
This was a public discussion, and therefore I have every right to "chime in".
As a paying customer, I have even more of a right to "chime in", as Cloudflare decisions may impact my business.
Putting a PoP in Cuba because "bleeding hearts from decades of terrible government policy" isn't a sound business decision. Nobody has offered any better explanation of advantages other than the novelty, and frankly, if that's the core reason... that's a bad decision and a blatant waste of money.
> Cubans have bigger concerns than getting a page to load a few milliseconds faster.
A big concern for Cubans could very well have, is having webpages load several seconds faster (I don't think we're talking miliseconds). They are paying per minute.
We issue SSL certificates for all plans, including our Free tier, and terminate HTTPS traffic all over the world. You don't need a Business plan for that.
(though imagine being uniquely placed to the USA along with other factors is a huge plus for building that infra).
What I found instead was extremely interesting and funny.
I won't spoil it, so go read the article :)