Cloudflare relaunches Turpentine as Migration Hub

Cloudflare has relaunched its Turpentine migration tool as the Migration Hub, a single destination for organizations moving to Cloudflare's CDN and edge platform. The announcement follows nearly two years of testing Turpentine, which automates the translation of Varnish Configuration Language (VCL) configurations into Cloudflare Workers.

The Migration Hub consolidates migration guides, product comparison resources, and step-by-step onboarding documentation in one place. Cloudflare says the guides are designed to help customers self-serve their migration without needing to contact sales or support—a response to the growing demand for its CDN services and the complexity of translating configurations between vendors.

Beyond the self-serve resources, Cloudflare has also stood up a dedicated Professional Services group for organizations that prefer hands-on assistance. The team works with customers to assess existing environments and manage the migration process, addressing the reality that many businesses have years of accumulated business logic baked into their current CDN configurations.

Product mapping guides replace vendor jargon translation

One of the core pain points in CDN migration is that different vendors use different terminology for the same concepts. Cloudflare's new guides attempt to cut through that confusion with product maps that show how Cloudflare features correspond to those in Akamai or Fastly, along with code examples for common configurations.

The intent is to make migration a matter of matching rules and implementing them, rather than translating feature names or resorting to ad-hoc code conversion. Cloudflare's guides also document how its Rules or Workers capabilities map to VCL or XML configurations from other vendors.

Since much of Cloudflare's platform is accessible for free, customers can sign up and start testing immediately. The guides are intended to support that independent testing process, with the option to reach out for help when needed.

Professional Services for complex environments

For organizations that have been locked into a vendor for years—often with configurations originally set up by third parties—the prospect of migrating can be intimidating. Cloudflare's Professional Services team is meant to address this directly, offering guidance through the entire onboarding process.

The service is designed for customers who are uncertain about how changes to their current configuration might impact downstream systems, or who simply lack in-house expertise with CDN migrations. The team provides knowledge about the migration process and tooling while attempting to make the transition as low-risk as possible.

Case studies: cost savings and reliability at scale

Cloudflare shared two customer stories highlighting different migration motivations:

  • Cost and performance: A mobile communications company moved its public website to Cloudflare after 20 years with Akamai, citing cost concerns and a desire for better digital experience. The organization reported more than 20% cost savings after a proof-of-concept with Cloudflare's Application Performance suite, and noted that adding Workers for serverless compute would enable further scaling.
  • Reliability under spikey traffic: A UK sporting company with an international fan base faced game-day traffic spikes reaching 10x normal levels. After migrating to Cloudflare, their site handled over 11 million requests in a single 24-hour match day, with Cloudflare's cache serving more than 93% of those requests and achieving 100% uptime.

Cloudflare says the Migration Hub will be updated as new features are added to the platform. The company plans to continue investing in Turpentine and related migration tooling as part of an ongoing effort to simplify the path onto its products.