Short post. I’m just so excited I can’t help myself.
I don’t know if you’ve heard about this yet, but Cloudflare can fix basically all of your SSL and reverse proxy issues with a couple of clicks. I’d heard about it somewhere and finally went to check it out today. Honestly, I didn’t believe it could be that easy.
Here’s what happened. Cloudflare Tunnels only work with domains that Cloudflare manages the DNS for. I wasn’t ready to move my entire.com over to their nameservers. I didn’t understand enough about how it worked yet. So I did what any cautious IT guy would do: I bought a test domain.
Turns out the.cc TLD was available, and Craig Corbin +.cc felt like a good fit for my brand if I ever needed it. Eight dollars and fifty cents. A test domain I could break without consequences.
I pointed the new domain at Cloudflare, installed the tunnel agent on a machine inside my home network, and clicked a couple of buttons.
It just works.
I’m not sure what else to say. It just works.
No more wrestling with SSL certificates. No more reverse proxy configurations that take me way too long to get right. No more opening ports on my firewall. The tunnel creates a secure, encrypted connection from my local machine to Cloudflare’s edge, and Cloudflare handles the SSL and routing from there.
I’ll be honest. I still suck at SSL certs. It takes me forever to get them right. Proxying traffic across machines takes me longer than it should. This thing turned all of that into a one-click operation.
I’ve already moved three or four services over to the.cc domain just to see if it holds up. It does. Perfectly. I’m getting ready to move my.com over and point all my DNS to Cloudflare’s nameservers, because it really is that easy.
If you haven’t checked out Cloudflare Tunnels, check them out.
Short post for now. Have a nice night.