Route public traffic to private applications with Cloudflare

For most of the Internet’s history, public and private infrastructure operated as separate worlds. Public applications lived behind content delivery networks (CDNs) and web application firewalls (WAFs). Private applications lived behind virtual private networks (VPNs), firewalls, and separate operational stacks. We think that distinction is becoming obsolete.

Many of the applications organizations care about are not public websites. They are internal APIs, AI agent backends, MCP servers, operational tools, and services that were never designed to be exposed to the public Internet. Yet these applications still need modern security, performance, and programmability services. Security should be a property of the traffic reaching an application, not an accident of where the application happens to sit.

Until now, applying those services to private applications often required public IPs, firewall exceptions, connector software, or complex networking. As a result, many private applications missed out on capabilities such as WAF, bot management, rate limiting, caching, traffic acceleration, rewrites, and Workers, despite needing the same protections and controls as public-facing applications.

Today, we're launching Application Services for Private Origins in closed beta for eligible Enterprise customers. Customers can now securely route traffic to private origins without exposing those origins to the public Internet. This allows Continue reading