Notes on Cloudflare Access

Cloudflare is now in the AWS zone: it has a long tail of useful but under-examined little services that haven't quite entered the zeitgeist the way the flagships have. One that we've recently started using — and quite admire — is Cloudflare Access. The UX is very simple. If you have a domain backed by Cloudflare DNS, and that domain runs through a DNS proxy, you can put a one-click authentication wall in front of it. Delightful.1Free up to fifty users, at which point it's seven dollars per user per month — worth knowing before you wall off something with a big team behind it. Obviously, this is not useful for everything, or even for most things. But we found two good use cases. The first is our admin site, which obviously needs to be protected — but doesn't need a broader authentication mechanism, or any real knowledge of a user model. The second is our internal tooling. We have an internal file-sharing tool, for instance; putting it behind the same access policy isn't a game-changer,…