CloudFlare Blog home How it works Support Login Sign up 08 Jul 2013 by Matvey Arye . Tweet CloudFlare has Points of Presence (PoPs) in 23 datacenters around the world and plans to expand to many more soon. It also has a single portal, CloudFlare.com , where website owners interact with the system. This creates a giant configuration propagation problem. Any time you log into CloudFlare.com and turn on a feature, app, or update a DNS record, you create what we refer to as a new rule. Whenever a request arrives at a PoP our DNS and web servers use these rules to determine how to respond. When you make a new rule, you expect this rule to be in effect everywhere, right away. Furthermore, you want CloudFlare to respect creation time ordering. For example, if you turn an app on and then off, you need a guarantee that the final state is off rather than on. And jus...