*APAC Careers Day* Building a Safer, Faster, and Reliable Network

Thank you for tuning into Cloudflare TV for APAC Careers Day. I'm here with my wonderful team members to talk about how we build a safer, faster and reliable network, our infrastructure team.

My name is James Nam. I manage our global logistics team here at Cloudflare from Singapore.

Hi, I'm Joanne from the network strategy team, focusing on the interconnection strategy for Cloudflare's network in the APAC region.

Good morning, good evening. My name is May Ma. I'm a global supply manager and part of the hardware sourcing team here in Singapore.

Hi everyone.

Hey everyone, this is Zena here. I am an engineering manager with the data center engineering team within the infrastructure organization.

And lastly, hi, my name is James.

I manage the data center deployments here based in Singapore as well.

Thanks guys.

Here at Cloudflare infrastructure, our core values are breadth, reliability and efficiency.

We continue to invest in the growth of our network.

People all around the world, they rely on our network every day, all around the world.

And we're excited to make our network safer, faster and more reliable, one new location at a time.

Our global network is one of our most important assets.

A larger and more powerful network drives faster and more powerful products. Our team, along with others, is responsible for growing the network, managing and expanding infrastructure footprint, evaluating our next generation infrastructure technologies and partners, operating the space and hardware for our large global network.

We move the atoms and make the connections required to move the bytes.

Our hardware engineering teams shape the future of our compute, storage and network hardware.

Our capacity planning teams decide where and how much. Our interconnection strategy and partnerships teams handle the commercial partnerships, edge cash partnerships and interconnection strategy.

Our data center selections team plan the where.

Where is the data center going to be? Where the equipment is going to go?

Our hardware sourcing teams are responsible for the procurement of the hardware and our logistics teams are responsible for sending the equipment where it is needed.

Our data center engineering teams are then responsible for building, maintaining and connecting our physical footprint to the Cloudflare network.

Today, our earlier panelists spoke about some of the amazing products we get to serve our customers.

From the web application firewall to workers, all the products we ship to customers rely on the network and the physical infrastructure that supports them.

Every server in every city can run every Cloudflare service.

Next, I'll pass it to Joanne, our interconnection strategy and partnerships manager.

Joanne, being the super mom, being a family person, you know, during this difficult time, are there any tips you can share to us and the wider audience about being more effective while working remotely?

Yeah, sure. Thank you, James.

So, just a little context, I joined Cloudflare a little more than a year ago when onboarding was done remotely and have been working remotely since.

I'm working from home while caring for two young children and what I found really helpful is having a schedule and following through with it.

I work in certain time blocks so that I can focus on my work while ensuring my children are watched over along the day.

So, Cloudflare's way of working also makes this very easy for me as we make full use of collaboration tools without the needs of many meeting sessions.

And this too gives me flexibility to work based on my schedule. So, I'll move on to the slide.

Thank you. The network strategy team, we are continuously working to expand Cloudflare's global network.

At present, the Cloudflare network spans over more than 200 cities in over 100 countries, including 25 cities in mainland China.

The network also interconnects with 9,800 networks globally, including major ISPs, cloud services and enterprises.

Next. So, the network strategy team handles three broad roles.

In commercial relationships, the team manages the relationship with providers or vendors.

The edge cash partnership team deals with the initiation of our edge cash platform and development of relationship with ISPs.

And lastly, the interconnect strategy team formulates interconnection plans by accessing requirements for direct connections across all regions.

So, all three functions shown here involve a high level of collaboration externally as well as internally.

And the team's aim is to continue to expand efficiently into more markets and increasing network bandwidth capacities through existing and new opportunities.

So, being a team player, being ready to learn and being inclusive are some of the values that help us succeed in what we set out to do.

So, that's all from me. Now onwards to a question to Mei. You were in a large global mining company before this.

How do you feel moving to the tech industry with Cloudflare?

Thanks for the great question, Joanne. So, coming from a large organization in mining, one of the key changes I feel about after moving to Cloudflare is that I have a better understanding about the impact of my work to the product offerings and all the way to the end customers.

So, this creates a set of new meanings to my day-to-day work and motivates me in a different way.

I recommend everyone should try it.

So, again, this is Mei. I'm a global supply manager and part of the hardware sourcing team within the infrastructure family.

The hardware sourcing team is a global team of commercial experts from a very diverse background.

We have team members based out of San Francisco, Austin, London, Lisbon, and Singapore.

And for the past one year, we have been growing significantly from two members team to now five people.

And we are constantly looking for the right talents to join us.

Our day-to-day key responsibility consists of collaborating with engineers to drive innovations and improve hardware performance and reliabilities.

We also partner with external suppliers and work very closely with internal planning, logistics, and engineering teams to expand our network capacity.

We help mitigate sourcing and supply chain risk. And one key aspect of our work is to optimize returns on capital investment and deliver that value to our shareholders and end customers.

So to give you a little bit more flavor about what we do, here are three examples that the team has been working on.

If you look at the bar chart on the right, it demonstrates the decrease in the cost per request over generation of servers we have deployed in our data centers.

The continuous reduction is achieved by constantly sourcing for better technologies available in the market and improve cost efficiency through our collaborations with partners.

The second story, which is on the next slide, that I want to tell you about is our partnership in CardingEdge Technologies.

It is super exciting to be in Cloudflare who is at the forefront of adopting latest and greatest technologies that come from our partners.

And a great joy working with engineers who share the obsessions about hardware efficiency.

Here are two examples of recent collaborations with NVIDIA and ARM that were published on Cloudflare blogs.

You can check them out at your leisure.

So the last story I'm going to talk about is supply chain risk mitigation.

As what Joanne has mentioned earlier, we have a massive network across the globe.

Our network relies on a very complex supply chain that involves thousands of partners.

Supply risk is a key enterprise risk. Due to a global pandemic, our company has faced a number of supply chain challenges, including semiconductor shortage, a very long supply lead time, and high cost inflations.

And the hardware sourcing team has been part of cross-functional efforts in mitigating this supply chain risk.

So that's a brief overview about the hardware sourcing team. If any of this interests you, that might be the place to be.

And the type of candidates we're looking for is someone who is good at relationship building, cross-functional collaboration, has commercial acumen, and also who is interested in problem solving and is not going to shy away from tough conversations.

With that said, I'm going to pass on to James now, who is going to tell you about what is global infrastructure logistic.

And before you go, James, I have one question for you.

What is your advice for people who are thinking about pursuing a career in logistic and shipping?

Thanks, Mei. I guess if, you know, in retrospect, we look back at the pandemic situation, I would say that those relationships that I've built across the region and around the world with our service providers are the most important ones that I need to leverage at this moment.

So I would tell people to really try to build out your network with people in the industry so that when you need help and you need favors during these difficult times, they'll be willing to give you a helping hand.

Thanks. Here at Cloudflare, our global infrastructure logistics team, we deliver hardware to over 200 cities worldwide to enable the expansion and growth of our global capacity footprint.

And that grows by the month as well. Everywhere around the world, we keep bringing people and places closer to our network every dot at a time.

Our team is based across all major regions to support the expansion of our network.

Here in APAC, we're all based in Singapore. In EMEA, we have teams that are based in London and Lisbon, Portugal.

In the United States, we have team members based in Austin, which is a growing hub for technology companies.

And we also have folks that are based in our San Francisco headquarters as well.

Here's just a very basic flow of what we do on a daily basis here in the global logistics team.

We may need to ship something as small as a microchip, just something very small.

Or we're going to be tasked to ship fully integrated server racks.

So the wide breadth of things that we need to deal with on a day-to-day basis.

We would arrange movement to a port of export where export customs formalities will take place.

Once approved, it will depart for our destination. And upon arrival, our teams will coordinate with our destination agents to perform import customs clearance.

Finally, we'll arrange deliveries to our data centers at the destination locations.

Then our engineering teams will take over and do their magic.

So our team members, they actually come from very diverse backgrounds.

They come from 3PL backgrounds, manufacturing backgrounds, from tech companies.

And some of them even come from trade compliance backgrounds and deal with some of the legal aspects of trade and shipping.

But fundamentally, everybody understands global logistics.

The trade-offs between cost versus performance, compliance, which is a very important focus area for our department.

They understand forecasting versus risk and how to measure those.

A lot of our team members, they are proficient in programming languages like Python because there's going to be some automation that we run between reports, between systems that might otherwise need some sort of middleware.

But with programming skills, we can bridge that gap.

In general, we're looking for people that work well in teams across functions. So beyond just the folks that are here on this call, they're going to have to deal with legal teams internally and externally.

They're going to have to deal with security teams.

They're going to deal with finance and accounting teams on a daily basis.

And they're going to have to deal with sales who always want our footprint to expand and we're more than happy to accommodate in most cases.

Thank you.

Next, I'll pass it to another James. Mr. James Wong, our engineering manager for data center deployments.

James, you've been in the company for a long time across various different time zones.

I met you before when you were based in our US offices and now you're here based in Singapore managing a global team, which is great.

What is your perhaps favorite aspect of working for Cloudflare so far? Thanks, James.

My favorite aspect of working at Cloudflare is that it's never an idle moment here.

For the past three and a half years, I've never felt that I've reached the peak of my career in Cloudflare and have stopped growing.

We're always growing, testing new hardware, deploying at a rapid pace and developing new projects and initiatives to be the next big hyperscaler.

So if you're interested in working at a fast-paced environment and seeing the results we put in, this is the perfect company for you.

Hi, everyone. My name is James and I'm part of the data center engineering team.

Our team's focus is to build, connect and maintain the infrastructure in our global cities and countries worldwide.

From scoping materials to submitting cross -connects to turn up internal and external bandwidth capacity and also maintaining the existing hardware, which thus helps grow the global fleet for Cloudflare to ensure high availability and productivity for customers at any given time.

Continuing to test and deploy new hardware technologies to increase efficiency at low cost to scale and grow.

We continue to strive to build the world's largest and most interconnected network from growing to continue to expand our new cities and countries, upgrading our existing sites and interconnecting with more network operators to better support our global customers and end users to get closer, quicker and have a safer Internet experience for their businesses and personal use.

With that, I'll hand off to my colleague, Zina, who will talk about the different roles and duties of data center engineering and how we work together to achieve those goals.

Before that, Zina, having one of the bigger and global teams in data center engineering, what's one of the most important traits that makes people successful on your team?

Hello, everybody.

This is Zina. I manage the data center engineering team. I'm also known as the network deployment engineering team here in Singapore and APAC, along with James.

To answer to James's question as to what is that one important trait that makes people successful on this team, I truly, honestly do not think there's just one trait.

In fact, just a combination of a bunch of smaller traits here and there, along with some good positive attitude and a cheerful, pleasant personality, if I may say, in the side.

Some traits, if I have to mention, would definitely be proactiveness, having key interest in tech, data centers in general, on the L1 and L2 layers, wanting to just improve things, looking for some, you know, just to improve, basically.

Someone who has a global mind, wants to be a part of a hyperscaling network, handling very critical projects, and just wanting to do, basically, some good work at the end of the day.

And if this is you, then you'll be just fine on the team. Not to forget, wanting to work in a very diverse team.

Diversity, according to Cloudflare and according to us, is extremely important in all aspects.

Coming back to the slide now, just as James explained, our team's vision and mission is that we strive to keep a maximum uptime of all of our hardware at our core and at our edge data centers.

Just as Joanne mentioned earlier, that Cloudflare has about 200 plus points of presence, or POPs that we call, in unique cities across the globe.

And that's how widespread our global footprint is.

That's how spread out our network is. Which also means that it literally takes a battalion to deploy, provision, and to maintain these data centers, and to maintain all of the hardware.

As you can see on the slide, these are our three main pillars that hold the data center engineering team pretty strongly.

They are the build pillar, the maintain, and the connect pillar. And they're very well supported by our TPMs, our technical project managers, and our security and compliance.

So this, along with all of our other associated infrastructure organizations, some of the team members who've just presented with me earlier, is basically what keeps infrastructure at Cloudflare thriving and growing exponentially.

As we aim to hyperscale our network and our presence across the globe.

The build pillar, the first pillar, is mainly responsible for the end-to-end of a project.

Be it designing and deploying a data center in a brand new city, or expanding an existing one, or decommissioning a data center, migrating it from one place to another, anything under the sun, we do it.

For example, right from the time when a deal is signed by our planning team, by our data center selection team, our engineers jump in right away.

They'll plan, they'll architect, they'll execute, they'll deploy, and they'll work on all of the physical aspects of the installation and carry out it in various maintenances.

They also work very, very closely with our third-party vendors and our site technicians to get the job done.

But our job is not done yet. We then move into a logical provisioning phase where we provision all of these gears that were just recently installed by our engineers.

We provision our networking gears as well, followed by which we provision all of the compute servers that were just installed and turned up.

So right from the time where we install these servers, from the time where we've punched in the power button to the time where we eventually have our customers' traffic flowing in these servers, the end-to-end is the responsibility of this pillar.

So we touch the physical and the logical layers every single day.

We have an infrastructure engineering team as well who help to build us automations, to build us tools for the DCE team to be successful and to ensure continuous improvement in our internal processes, thereby reducing all of the manual stuff that we don't want anymore.

On the other hand, our maintained pillar, as the name suggests, helps us to maintain the health of all of our hardware in our edge and core data centers.

These engineers, they act as a mini-NOC by handling all of the alerts, monitoring, handling all of the RMAs, which are broken hardware sitting in our data centers.

They handle all of the break-fixes, they manage all of the incidents.

All in all, they take care of all the noise in the background.

They are the first point of contact for any alerts, troubleshooting, verifications.

Once they handle all of these broken hardware, they then help us by bringing these equipment back into production.

I like to call them as our frontline workers, the frontline force, frontline engineers, keeping the rest of the organization sane and running smoothly by being very quick reactors to anything that goes down in the physical world.

Our third pillar, the Connect pillar, works on interconnection between our COPs or points of presence.

This pillar handles the network side of the DCE team.

They get to work with all of the ISP teams, with our external partners, our providers for network capacity.

They handle the day-to -day operations, expansions, and growth.

Anything to do with DCIs, to do with peering, bandwidth expansions, network upgrades, growth strategies and improvements.

Anything to do with CNIs, PNIs, LOAs, etc. are handled by these Connect pillars.

They are basically trying to buff up our network every single day. Coming to our TPMs, they act as a glue, thereby helping us to keep the ball rolling and also helping us to achieve our stringent project deadlines by keeping us all in track.

Our security and compliance, on the other hand, helps us to be safe, secure, and to keep us updated with all of the regulations and guidelines to ensure that our physical assets, basically all of our gears in our data centers, are protected at all times against, you may say, loss, against damage, theft, or any kind of manipulation or anything else which compromises Cloud Plus for our business.

Lastly, and I truly believe that collaboration is key here and that it takes a village to complete successful quarters after quarters.

The success of the DCE team is heavily, heavily dependent on the success of a lot of our other associated team and team members, some of whom I've just presented here.

So you may ask, what are the kind of candidates or engineers are we looking for?

So all of our viewers right now, or any one of you who are listening to us at a later time, if your life revolves around, say, hardware or the L1 or L2 layer in general, around networking, Linux, troubleshooting, if you like to handle, manage critical time-bound projects, if you like to work in a very fast-paced environment, if diversity is in your minds, if you're automation-centric, if tooling is in your mind, please and please reach out to us.

We really want folks who are extremely driven, very proactive, who always have an ever-inquiring inquisitive mind, who like to troubleshoot and solve issues, who, on the other hand, want to make a very big, want to make a bigger impact on the overall Internet that touches millions and billions of lives every single day and who want to stand strong by us and by Cloudflare's motto of making the Internet a better and a safer place one day at a time.

If any of these presentations piques your interest, please reach out to us. Now, James will let you know how and whom and all of the other logistics.

Thanks, Zeena.

Yeah, so, as Zeena said, we're continuing to grow within our department.

We grew two times from 2019 to 2020, and then we're on track to double again this year as well.

The different teams, as you see on the right side, is that we have a presence in APAC, which are the Data Center Engineering, Infrastructure Engineering, Logistics, Hardware Sourcing, Network Strategy, and Data Center Selection.

Data Center Selection is to help reach out to the co -locations in our region and to grow our global footprint in the region and the world as well, too.

So, to learn more about our current openings, please visit us at Cloudflare.com slash careers.

Thanks for joining. We hope you learned a little bit more about what our team does to build a better and safer Internet.

And I'll pass it on to Mei.

Do we have any additional questions? Yeah. I have one here for Zeena.

So, we know in general, engineering and the IT industry is a relatively male -dominant industry.

And I think you have achieved quite some success in this part of the world.

Being a senior manager in the Data Center Engineering team since then has been managing a global team out of APEC.

I personally find it very inspiring.

And I'm sure a lot of people who are listening to these stories also find it so.

I'm just wondering, would you mind sharing a little bit more experience about working in Cloudflare in the engineering team?

And what kind of advice do you have for women who are interested in pursuing a career in tech sector?

Of course, I'd love to take that up, Mei.

Thanks for that question. To be honest, if you want me to be really honest, at least in Cloudflare, I feel absolutely no different to be a woman, let alone a woman in tech, than any other person of any other gender.

I am for sure, I know 100% that my voice is equally heard, that my opinions are equally considered, that they matter, and that everybody, irrespective of your gender, your culture, your caste, your background, you're equally treated in this company.

We all have been given a very common platform here, to grow, to scale, to personally grow our careers, and to help, and to be a part of this Cloudflare's ever-growing, ever-scaling family.

Speaking of just women in general, in tech, in IT, if that's something that you want to pursue as your career, just look at the company values before you join any organization, for that matter.

And just see to it that those organizations, they stand true to their values.

If their core values match up to your standards, then just go for it.

Literally just go for it.

I can at least, like I said, vouch for Cloudflare, because I've been here for, I think, 3.5 plus years now.

I've changed my paths, and one of my literally life -changing, career-changing parts in this company was when I became a manager, from being an individual contributor to managing a global team across different locations, with very little management background, in fact, with very little management experience.

But just the combination of my tech background along with my interpersonal skills has basically made me successful here, and, of course, goes without saying, just your team's contribution, your team's involvement, and their support.

And this has been possible only because of, I truly believe that it's because of Cloudflare's core values, that every single person in Cloudflare just stands by it.

There is no differentiation of any kind, of any matter, in any given point of time.

I know if I'm sitting in a meeting, my voice is equally heard, and that I've never felt any different from any other gender, to be honest.

So if Cloudflare is what you're looking for, please get back to us.

If there's any other organization that you're looking for, look at their core values and see to it that they stand by it, so that you don't feel any different from any other gender.

Thanks for the great answer, Zina. And I do share the same kind of feelings, and everyone is upholding the Cloudflare values.

I don't feel like a gender in this perspective in your IT company.

I personally relate to your answer over there.

We have two more minutes. Maybe we're up for another one question here. So I'm going to point this question to James now.

James, you have many years of experience working in logistics and shipping, and I know you have worked for a lot of different organizations, large, medium, different sizes.

So after you joined Cloudflare, I'm just curious, what has been the most challenging task you have taken up so far?

Just to make a short answer on time, it has to be this pandemic.

Again, like I said, it's not me.

My team and our partners were the ones that are helping us to deliver on a day-to-day basis.

If you try to find new partners today, they're not going to be able to help you.

Everyone is in a really tough situation in our industry.

So really, the partnerships during this pandemic have really helped us to deliver.

Again, that has been the most challenging thing here during my time. Thanks for the answer.

I think that's a wrap. Thanks for tuning in to Cloudflare TV.

I hope you enjoyed this section, getting to know more about what infrastructure is in Cloudflare and our team here.