5 Advanced Cloudflare Features You Should Be Using

Cloudflare is often seen as just a simple CDN and DNS provider, but its platform offers a suite of powerful, advanced features that can dramatically improve your website's security, performance, and reliability. If you're only using Cloudflare for its basic services, you're missing out on a significant part of its value. In this post, we'll explore five advanced Cloudflare features that you should consider implementing today.

1. Cloudflare Workers: Serverless Compute at the Edge

What it is: Cloudflare Workers allows you to run JavaScript, Rust, C, and C++ code on Cloudflare's global network. Instead of running on a centralized server, your code executes in the data center closest to your user, resulting in extremely low latency.

Why it's powerful:

• Performance: Since the code runs at the edge, response times are incredibly fast.
• Scalability: Workers scale automatically with your traffic. You don't need to manage servers or containers.
• Flexibility: You can intercept and modify HTTP requests and responses, perform A/B testing, serve dynamic content, authenticate users, and much more, right from the edge.

Use Case: Imagine you want to redirect users to a different version of your site based on their country. With a few lines of JavaScript in a Cloudflare Worker, you can read the CF-IPCountry header and perform the redirect without any changes to your origin server.

addEventListener('fetch', event => {
  event.respondWith(handleRequest(event.request))
})

async function handleRequest(request) {
  const country = request.headers.get('CF-IPCountry')
  
  if (country === 'IN') {
    return Response.redirect('https://in.example.com', 302)
  }
  
  return fetch(request)
}

2. Argo Smart Routing: A Waze for the Internet

What it is: Argo Smart Routing monitors real-time network conditions on the internet—like congestion, latency, and packet loss—and intelligently routes your traffic through the fastest and most reliable paths on Cloudflare's private network.

Why it's powerful:

• Reduces Latency: By avoiding congested internet "highways," Argo can significantly reduce page load times for your users.
• Improves Reliability: It routes around network outages and brownouts, increasing your site's availability.

Cloudflare claims that Argo Smart Routing can reduce internet latency by an average of 30%. While it's a paid add-on, for e-commerce sites or applications where every millisecond counts, the performance boost can translate directly to higher conversions and revenue.

3. Cloudflare Access: Beyond VPNs

What it is: Cloudflare Access is a Zero Trust security solution that provides secure access to your internal applications without a traditional VPN. It allows you to enforce granular access policies based on user identity, device posture, and location.

Why it's powerful:

• Enhanced Security: Access ensures that every request to your application is authenticated and authorized, significantly reducing your attack surface. It integrates with identity providers like Google, Okta, and GitHub.
• Better User Experience: Users get a seamless, browser-based login experience without the clunkiness of a VPN client.

Use Case: You can secure your internal staging environment (staging.yourcompany.com) so that only authenticated employees from your organization can access it, blocking all other traffic at the Cloudflare edge before it ever reaches your server.

4. Rate Limiting: Block Malicious Bots and Brute-Force Attacks

What it is: Rate Limiting allows you to define thresholds for requests to specific URLs or API endpoints. If a single IP address exceeds that threshold, Cloudflare will temporarily block them.

Why it's powerful:

• Protects Your Origin: It prevents your origin server from being overwhelmed by malicious traffic.
• Stops Brute-Force Attacks: You can protect sensitive endpoints like /login or /api/v1/auth from password-guessing attacks.
• Prevents Content Scraping: It can deter bots from scraping your website content.

Example Rule: You can create a rule that if an IP makes more than 10 POST requests to /login in one minute, they are blocked for the next 15 minutes.

5. Cloudflare for SaaS: Custom Hostnames for Your Customers

What it is: If you run a SaaS application, Cloudflare for SaaS allows you to extend the security and performance benefits of Cloudflare to your customers' custom domains.

Why it's powerful:

• Seamless Custom Domains: Your customers can use their own branded domain (e.g., app.customer.com) for your service while you manage the SSL certificates, WAF rules, and performance settings centrally from your Cloudflare account.
• Automatic SSL: Cloudflare handles the issuance and renewal of SSL certificates for all your customer domains, a process that can be complex and error-prone to manage at scale.

This feature is a game-changer for any SaaS business that wants to offer a professional, white-labeled experience to its users without the operational headache of managing thousands of custom domains and SSL certificates.

Conclusion

Cloudflare offers much more than just a free CDN. By leveraging its advanced features like Workers, Argo, Access, Rate Limiting, and Cloudflare for SaaS, you can build more secure, performant, and reliable applications. Take some time to explore these features in your Cloudflare dashboard—you might find the perfect solution to a problem you've been struggling with.