One of the most common feature requests we get is to allow customers to share account access. This has been supported at our Enterprise level of service, but is now being extended to all customers. Starting today, users can go to the new home of Cloudflare’s Dashboard at dash.cloudflare.com. Upon login, users will see the redesigned account experience. Now users can manage all of their account level settings and features in a more streamlined UI.
CC BY 2.0 image by Mike Lawrence
All customers now have the ability to invite others to manage their account as Administrators. They can do this from the ‘Members’ tab in the new Account area on the Cloudflare dashboard. Invited Administrators have full control over the account except for managing members and changing billing information.
For Customers who belong to multiple accounts (previously known as organizations), the first thing they will see is an account selector. This allows easy searching and selection between accounts. Additionally, there is a zone selector for searching through zones across all accounts. Enterprise customers still have access to the same roles as before with the addition of the Administrator and Billing Roles.
The New Dashboard @ dash.cloudflare.com
As previously announced in our blog post about deprecating old TLS versions, we are migrating the dashboard from www.cloudflare.com/a to dash.cloudflare.com. The new dashboard will only support TLS versions 1.2 and greater in order for us to comply with PCI and NIST guidelines. If you are connecting to the existing dashboard with a TLS version older than 1.2, you will see a banner warning you of this.
Starting May 22, 2018, all customers visiting the dashboard at its current location, www.cloudflare.com/a will be redirected to dash.cloudflare.com.
Behind the Scenes
This change is not just a UI update with some new functionality. Behind the scenes, two major changes were implemented. First, much of the dashboard has been rewritten from Backbone to React. This improves our developer velocity as the number of front-end developers building the dashboard grows. Second, We have overhauled the mobile browsing experience, so you can easily manage your zones on the go.
On the backend, we have overhauled our data model for account and user management. Whereas before accounts, users and the resources they owned were very tightly coupled, now they are distinct, decoupled objects. This major change is what enabled us to expand multi-user access to all of our customers. Segregating users from accounts also allows us to clean up our architecture for our distributed development teams. The systems that power our products can now be explicit in what they need access to (users vs accounts), and we can limit their access to that data appropriately.
What’s Next?
This is just the first step in bringing a better user management story to all customers. We have many improvements planned for how customers authenticate, manage access and permissions, and organize their zones in Cloudflare. If you have feedback on the new experience or what you’d like to see us build next, visit the dashboard section of the Cloudflare Community, and let us know!