Terraforming Cloudflare

[UlisesGascon]

Seems like there is traction to use Terraform to manage changes in Cloudflare. #3220.

I would love to discuss this idea further and take the lead on the initiative if we decide to move forward.

I am facing a similar challenge with my personal project, so I can create a minimum viable product and share it with the team to see how it would work in practice.

In the past, I have utilized Terraform in conjunction with Azure services and discovered it to be an exceptional solution for implementing infrastructure modifications through pull requests, thereby increasing transparency within the infrastructure.

[UlisesGascon]

As agreed in #3299 I will work on a personal POC that I will present to the team so we can understand the complexity and challenges in our organization.

The most critical part is to avoid any disruption in the downloads related settings in Cloudflare.

Note: I will re-include this issue in the agenda once the POC is ready

[UlisesGascon]

I finished the POC and it is working fine, if you are interested in review it... I can grant you access to the private repo and a short demo 15m (terraform basics, github actions changes, etc..) in video format.

Based on the discussion in #3362

Next steps

• I will ask for Cloudflare permissions (read only) in the admin repo. Access to Cloudflare admin#800
• I will ask for a new repository creation (initially private) in the admin repo.
• I will check how to setup Terraform Cloud account with the @nodejs/build and document the process. Setup Terraform Cloud account #3370
• I will fetch all the Cloudflare resources into the new repository, prepare the the Github pipelines and documentation (Read only token, no risk for Cloudflare current setup).

After that we can decide

• If we can make the repository open (as the DNS information seems not to be sensitive)
• If we are happy with this solution and then promote the usage including a Write Token for trigger Cloudflare changes from Terraform files using Github Actions.

[richardlau]

Do we need a Terraform Cloud account (vs running Terraform locally)?

[UlisesGascon]

Once #3391 is merged.

Next Steps:

• Clean the DNS records that are no longer relevant, see:
  • Terraforming Cloudflare for DNS records #3391 (comment),
  • Terraforming Cloudflare for DNS records #3391 (comment) and
  • Terraforming Cloudflare for DNS records #3391 (comment)
• Update the documentation with better examples, see:
  • Terraforming Cloudflare for DNS records #3391 (comment)

[UlisesGascon]

This is currently stopped until R2 migration is completed, as agreed on #3574