Cloudflare Scales Infrastructure as Code with Shift-Left Security Practices

"Cloudflare has eliminated manual configuration errors across hundreds of production accounts by implementing Infrastructure as Code with automated policy enforcement, processing approximately 30 merge requests daily while catching security violations before deployment rather than after incidents occur. The company's Customer Zero team faced a critical problem: a single misconfiguration could propagate across Cloudflare's global edge in seconds, potentially locking out employees or taking down production services."

"Every production change now goes through a validation pipeline that enforces approximately 50 security policies before deployment. Teams still use the dashboard for analytics and observability, but critical production changes require code commits tied to users, tickets, and automated compliance checks. According to Chase Catelli, Ryan Pesek, and Derek Pitts from Cloudflare's team, this shift-left approach moves security validation to the earliest stages of development, catching issues when remediation costs are lowest."

Cloudflare eliminated manual configuration errors across hundreds of production accounts by implementing Infrastructure as Code with automated policy enforcement. A single misconfiguration could propagate across Cloudflare's global edge in seconds, risking employee lockouts or production outages, so manual dashboard management was too risky at scale. All infrastructure configurations are treated as code with mandatory peer review and automated security checks, and every production change passes a validation pipeline enforcing approximately 50 security policies before deployment. Teams continue to use dashboards for analytics and observability, while critical production changes require code commits tied to users, tickets, and automated compliance checks. The shift-left approach moves security validation to early development stages, preventing incidents, reducing remediation cost, and increasing engineering velocity. The implementation uses Terraform with the Cloudflare Terraform Provider, Atlantis and GitLab, a centralized monorepo with designated code owners, and a custom Go program called tfstate-butler as an HTTP backend for Terraform.

Read at InfoQ