Cloudflare

Your first practical step is pointing your domain at Cloudflare — understanding DNS avoids site outages.

Encryption isn't optional — Cloudflare gives free certs, but you must understand the modes to avoid breaking the site.

Caching is the number-one reason sites get fast on Cloudflare — and understanding the rules slashes origin load.

Cloudflare made its name stopping DDoS — and the WAF blocks exploits before they reach your origin.

The Rules engine lets you control per-request behavior — redirects, caching, security — without touching the origin.

With multiple origins, load balancing spreads visitors and routes around unhealthy servers automatically.

Instead of a classic VPN, Cloudflare Access verifies every user on every request — the heart of modern Zero Trust.

Workers run your code at the edge close to the user with near-zero cold starts — the future of serverless apps.

Edge apps need edge data — Cloudflare offers object, key-value, and SQL storage with no egress fees.

Pages deploys your frontends straight from Git to the global edge with per-branch previews — ideal for GitOps.

Managing Cloudflare at scale must be automated — the API and Terraform make every setting reproducible and reviewable.