Fortifying your stack with Cloudflare: A security playbook

Cloudflare outages have prompted senior engineers to reassess the reliance on edge computing, emphasizing the need for a balanced approach to integrating Cloudflare's services within their architecture. While Cloudflare offers robust global routing, DDoS protection, and centralized visibility, it should not be viewed as a stand-alone solution for security and reliability. Instead, it operates as a control plane that augments application-level security, requiring teams to maintain core security measures such as authentication, authorization, and data integrity at the origin level. Outages serve as critical design signals, prompting teams to examine their assumptions about availability and responsibility and to ensure that Cloudflare's controls are used to enhance, not replace, existing security protocols. Engineers are encouraged to treat Cloudflare as part of a layered defense strategy, recognizing its limitations and planning for potential failures by ensuring that their systems can degrade gracefully without compromising security guarantees.