Automating data center expansions with Airflow

Cloudflare has developed its own Provisioning-as-a-Service (PraaS) platform, automating the installation of new servers and reducing manual operational tasks by 90%. The company chose Apache Airflow as an open-source workflow management platform to organize automatic steps. Each SOP step is implemented as a task in the DAG, with most tasks being API calls to Salt, which automates the management and configuration of any infrastructure or application. PraaS has various features such as failure handling, logging, notifications, Jinja templating, macros, and managing dependencies between tasks. The platform also supports branching and multi-DAGs for complex workflows. Cloudflare's ultimate goal is a fully autonomous system that monitors new server installations in edge data centers and automatically triggers expansions without human intervention.