How Cloudflare uses Terraform to manage Cloudflare

Configuration management is far from a solved problem. As organizations scale beyond a handful of administrators, having a secure, auditable, and self-service way of updating system settings becomes invaluable. Managing a Cloudflare account is no different. With dozens of products and hundreds of API endpoints, keeping track of current configuration and making bulk updates across multiple zones can be a challenge. While the Cloudflare Dashboard is great for analytics and feature exploration, any changes that could potentially impact users really should get a code review before being applied!

This is where Cloudflare's Terraform provider can come in handy. Built as a layer on top of the cloudflare-go library, the provider allows users to interface with the Cloudflare API using stateful Terraform resource declarations. Not only do we actively support this provider for customers, we make extensive use of it internally! In this post, we hope to provide some best practices we've learned about managing complex Cloudflare configurations in Terraform.

Why Terraform

Unsurprisingly, we find Cloudflare's products to be pretty useful for securing and enhancing the performance of services we deploy internally. We use DNS, WAF, Zero Trust, Email Security, Workers, and all manner of Continue reading