A Serverless Take on Zone Configuration Management

Cloudflare’s Partnerships team is responsible for ensuring the platform works smoothly for the companies that build on top of it. A recurring pain point for those partners was the tedious, manual process of copying or comparing zone configuration settings. A software development intern took on the problem and built a solution using Cloudflare Workers, with some help from the company’s audience of internal experts along the way.

From Job Post to Project

The intern, a master’s student at the National University of Singapore, found the role through a classmate’s post in a software engineering module. After applying and interviewing, they were drawn to the company’s mission of helping build a better Internet. The interview process itself stood out: recruiters and interviewers repeatedly asked what the candidate wanted to work on and checked whether the proposed project would be relevant to that interest. That emphasis on open communication did not end after the offer letter was signed — it became a cornerstone of the internship itself.

A Human-Centered Problem

The core issue was straightforward. When a partner or internal team needed to duplicate a zone’s configuration or compare two zones for misconfigurations, there was no automated path. With the sheer number of configuration options available in the Cloudflare dashboard, manually copying settings from one zone to another is not only time-consuming but also prone to human error. As customer onboarding scales, so do the risks.

There was an obvious technical starting point: Terraform. Cloudflare already supports it, but the approach has a limitation. Using Terraform assumes the customer or partner has deep technical resources. A tool that was meant to serve Cloudflare’s entire user base would require a simpler path, which drove the decision to use the publicly available Cloudflare v4 APIs.

The team built a browser-based web application that sits on those APIs and exposes configuration data through a clean user interface. Dubbed Zone Copier, the app shares the load with two auxiliary tools: Zone Viewer, a single page that displays all configurations for a zone, and Zone Comparison, which highlights the differences between zones. These were designed as complements to the Cloudflare Dashboard, not replacements. A deep dive into a single setting still belongs on the dashboard; these tools handle broad views and bulk operations.

Building Severless on Workers

The project was built exclusively on Cloudflare Workers, a departure from the intern’s prior server-based experience. Those earlier projects relied on Express and Node.js backends; here, the backend used the itty-router library to interface with Cloudflare’s APIs. Writing on Workers meant no server provisioning overhead and the kind of serverless benefits that remove cold starts, things that weren’t possible in conventional cloud stacks.

Before any UI code was written, the intern spent several weeks carefully mapping the API endpoints. This groundwork was trickier than expected: even a single endpoint could return different response shapes depending on whether a zone had an empty setting (like zero Firewall Rules) or used a nested structure. Each endpoint had to be traced by hand so the application would handle those edge cases cleanly.

On the frontend, the tooling is React, with the Chakra-UI library for interface components, and React Router handling page transitions. The result is a toolset deployed directly through Workers.

Validating the Prototype

It’s hardly new that a developer’s favorite thing to hear is a room of potential users finding their tool impactful. The intern presented an early prototype of Zone Viewer and Zone Comparison to the Solutions Engineering team to look for gaps and requested additions. The feedback was rewarding as well as practical.

  • Zone Copier was expected to reduce human error significantly for partners who routinely duplicate settings between zones.
  • The same mechanism could be adapted to deploy a best-in-class configuration across many zones with just a few clicks.
  • There was interest in whether the tool could also generate quarterly configuration reports.
  • The Zone Viewer's structure would help the Solutions Engineering team put together documentation for proof-of-concept reports.
  • Better visibility into how zones were configured would allow the team to hand out more precise recommendations to customers.

The session also revealed a side benefit beyond the application’s usefulness: fresh input from those outside the immediate development team frequently surfaces ideas that would have been missed otherwise, and the contributors raised thoughtful questions about the architecture of the application itself.

According to the developer, there was a particular cultural undercurrent to the internships at Cloudflare beyond the project work. The company participates in the Pledge 1% movement, reserving 1% of time and 1% of product to give back. That meant the intern spent a morning cleaning up East Coast Park beach as part of the company’s local community efforts. There was also a flex in the daily schedule: when the internship period intersected with university coursework, the manager proved flexible about adjusting time to accommodate those academic commitments.

Refining Priorities for a Strong Handoff

The post underscores that positive internship outcomes hinge less on writing lines of code alone and more on gathering outside points of view along the way. The most useful project will flounder at demo day if the audience hasn’t been shown its value in smaller increments. The difference between useful feedback and generic praise is in the specifics of that feedback: no harm in building a tool that can generate quarterly reports, but customers use it daily because it eliminates the risk of a fat-fingered misconfiguration.

Anyone looking to reproduce an equally effective internship will want to mirror two of the points the developer hit early on. First, they listened to the people who would actually use the tool during the planning phase. Second, they invested early in learning the API specs – an act that slowed initial progress but saved painful refactors later, once the need to handle empty settings and nested response structures became paramount.

Fall intern roles are opening at Cloudflare soon, so candidates interested in similarly serverless, People-first engineering work should keep an eye on the careers page.