Shifting left at enterprise scale: how we manage Cloudflare with Infrastructure as Code

The Cloudflare platform is a critical system for Cloudflare itself. We are our own Customer Zero – using our products to secure and optimize our own services. 

Within our security division, a dedicated Customer Zero team uses its unique position to provide a constant, high-fidelity feedback loop to product and engineering that drives continuous improvement of our products. And we do this at a global scale — where a single misconfiguration can propagate across our edge in seconds and lead to unintended consequences. If you've ever hesitated before pushing a change to production, sweating because you know one small mistake could lock every employee out of critical application or take down a production service, you know the feeling. The risk of unintended consequences is real, and it keeps us up at night.

This presents an interesting challenge: How do we ensure hundreds of internal production Cloudflare accounts are secured consistently while minimizing human error?

While the Cloudflare dashboard is excellent for observability and analytics, manually clicking through hundreds of accounts to ensure security settings are identical is a recipe for mistakes. To keep our sanity and our security intact, we stopped treating our configurations as manual point-and-click tasks and Continue reading