How Cloudflare uses Cloudflare Spectrum: A look into an intern’s project at Cloudflare

Ryan Jacobs, an intern at Cloudflare, was tasked with improving the usability of Spectrum, a layer 4 reverse proxy, for internal customers. The existing process required manual configuration updates and was time-consuming. To solve this problem, Jacobs utilized the Addressing API, which manages IP prefixes and delegations within Cloudflare. By integrating the Addressing API with Spectrum's configuration service, he allowed particular customers to use Cloudflare managed addresses as origins for their Spectrum apps. This approach also mitigated potential issues such as cycles or connections to non-public Internet IP ranges. The integration required making an additional HTTP request on the critical path of every create app request in the Spectrum configuration service, but performance testing showed minimal impact. Jacobs' work contributed to improving the overall efficiency and usability of Cloudflare's internal services.