Cloudflare seeks to help its end customers use whichever public and private clouds best suit their needs. Towards that goal, we have been working to make sure our solutions work well with various public cloud providers including Microsoft’s Azure platform.
If you are an Azure customer, or thinking about becoming one, here are three ways we have made Cloudflare’s performance and security services work well with Azure.
1) The development of an Azure application for Cloudflare Argo Tunnel.
We are proud to announce an application for Cloudflare Argo Tunnel within the Azure marketplace. As a quick reminder, Argo Tunnel establishes an encrypted connection between the origin and the Cloudflare edge. The small tunnel daemon establishes outbound connections to the two nearest Cloudflare PoPs, and the origin is only accessible via the tunnel between Cloudflare and origin.
Because these are outbound connections, there is likely no need to modify firewall rules, configure DNS records, etc. You can even go so far as to block all IPs on the origin and allow traffic only to flow through the tunnel. You can learn more here. The only prerequisite for using Argo Tunnel is to have Argo enabled on your Cloudflare zone. You can sign up a new domain here.
You can find instructions on how to configure Argo Tunnel through the Azure interface here.
2) Azure is promoting a serverless solution for its Static Web Hosting service, and Cloudflare wants to help you secure it!
Cloudflare makes SSL issuance and renewal remarkably easy, and it is included in every plan type. There are a few extra steps to getting this to work on Azure’s serverless platform, so we’ve created this guide for you to get started.
3) Use of Cloudflare’s speedy DNS resolver, 1.1.1.1, with Azure
Cloudflare has created a free DNS resolver to improve DNS response times. We blogged about this last year. A few important takeaways are: this resolver runs in all our data centers globally and thus is highly performant, is future proofed for emerging DNS protocols that enhance security (DNS over TLS/HTTPs), and minimizes DNS query information shared with intermediate resolvers.
Cloudflare does daily monitoring of this resolver to make sure it consistently performs well on the Azure platform. Here are a few steps to take to make use of 1.1.1.1 if you are an Azure user.
Stay tuned on further Cloudflare support for Azure.