■ Cloudflare Edge Engineering · Full Surface

    Most teams treat Cloudflare as a CDN. We use it as a deployment target.

    RequestCLOUDFLARE EDGEWorkersWAF · RulesCacheRedirect RulesR2 Storagezero egressOriginWordPress · Laravel · Pages
    Ritesh Agarwal, lead architect at Appycodes

    ■ Talk to the lead architect

    S3 egress bill climbing, WAF rules misfiring, or a migration that needs edge routing? Bring it directly to Ritesh — no SDR, no qualification call.

    Ritesh Agarwal · Lead Architect, Appycodes · LinkedIn

    ■ What you get

    Six surfaces we actually ship on.

    Not an exhaustive list of Cloudflare products. Only the ones we use in production today and can recommend with a war story attached.

    01

    R2 storage migrations

    Off S3, DO Spaces, or origin disk. Cost-modelled before the move. Standalone PHP / Node migration scripts that don't load the host CMS so they survive plugin / package conflicts.

    02

    Workers for edge logic

    A/B testing, personalisation, header rewrites, geo-aware redirects, signed-URL gates, simple auth. Code that runs in 270+ POPs without thinking about it.

    03

    Redirect Rules architecture

    Single Redirect Rules on Business+, Bulk Redirects from exported sitemaps (up to 100K), wildcard fallbacks via wildcard_replace. Layered for ambiguous shapes.

    04

    WAF rule design

    Country allowlists. ASN blocking. Bot management with Managed Challenge tuning. Rate limiting that bites attackers, not Googlebot. We test under Managed Challenge before flipping to Block.

    05

    Cache strategy

    What to cache at the edge, what to bypass, how to invalidate. Tuned for WordPress, WooCommerce, and Laravel apps where pages and APIs cache very differently.

    06

    Pages deployments

    Static and Next.js sites where the build pipeline fits. Custom builds with Workers in front. Branch previews, custom domains, the boring deployment plumbing.

    ▼ The Egress Cost Curve

    Why media-heavy WordPress sites move to R2.

    Monthly cost ($) for 100 GB stored across S3 (eu-west-2), DigitalOcean Spaces (lon1), and Cloudflare R2 — plotted against outbound egress (TB / month). R2's zero-egress pricing produces the sharp divergence at the right.

    R2 stays flat because egress is zero. The other two scale linearly with outbound traffic.

    ■ Evidence

    Three engagements. Different Cloudflare primitives in each.

    R2 + Forge migration

    All White Laser

    Migrated media from a Forge-hosted WordPress site to Cloudflare R2 (S3-compatible, endpoint https://<account-id>.r2.cloudflarestorage.com).

    Interesting part wasn't the migration — it was sidestepping plugin Guzzle conflicts. AutomateWoo and others bundle their own Guzzle; the bundled versions disagree. Solution: don't load WordPress in the migration script. Standalone PHP, AWS SDK via Composer in a separate vendor tree, credentials in a dedicated r2-config.php with chmod 600, off-VCS.

    Recurring monthly cron sync uses the same WP-free script pattern so it survives plugin updates.

    # r2-config.php (chmod 600, off-VCS)
    $config = [
      'endpoint' => 'https://<id>.r2.cloudflarestorage.com',
      'region' => 'auto',
      'credentials' => [ ... ],
    ];

    Redirect rules at the edge

    UK action-sports retailer (anonymised)

    Magento → Shopify migration with ambiguous URL shapes the platform couldn't resolve. Wildcards via wildcard_replace on Free/Pro plans (no regex), regex Single Redirect Rules on Business+, layered with explicit per-URL overrides.

    Long-term: Cloudflare Bulk Redirects driven by an exported sitemap CSV. Wildcard rules retained as fallback. Client name changed due to confidentiality — whitelabel engagement.

    # regex Single Redirect Rule
    when (http.request.uri.path matches "^/[^/]+\.html
    quot;) then concat("/products", regex_replace( http.request.uri.path, "\.html
    quot;, ""))

    WAF · geo · bot defence

    PlusHeat

    nginx upstream timeouts caused by Hetzner Cloud bots hammering specific paths. Built the Cloudflare WAF rule using an allowlist approach (not ip.src.country in {GB IE FR DE NL ...}) rather than enumerating every country to block.

    Carved out India, Pakistan, and the US — necessary for our own developers and search engine crawlers. Added cf.client.bot to ensure verified Googlebot bypasses geo restrictions. Deployed first under Managed Challenge to monitor Firewall Events for false positives, switched to Block once clean.

    # Cloudflare WAF expression
    (not ip.src.country in {"GB" "IE" "FR" "DE" "NL" "IN" "PK" "US"})
    and not cf.client.bot

    Paired engagements: Shopify migration (the rules above), WordPress security (the WAF tuning), maintenance & support for the ongoing edge tuning.

    ■ Good fit if

    • WordPress / WooCommerce sites paying for S3 egress on media-heavy stores
    • Teams migrating platforms (Magento, WordPress, custom → Shopify) with messy URL shapes
    • Sites under attack — DDoS, credential stuffing, content scraping — that need WAF rules tuned by someone who has tuned them before
    • Operators using Cloudflare as the orange cloud and nothing else, leaving 80% of the value on the table

    ■ Probably not a fit

    • Sites where Cloudflare isn't deployed at all — start with a free tier and basic DNS
    • Apps with hard requirements for Fastly, Akamai, or AWS CloudFront edge specifically
    • Teams looking for a Cloudflare reseller — we engineer, we don't bill for the plan

    ■ Surface we operate on

    Workers, R2, WAF, Rules, Pages. The rest on demand.

    Edge compute
    Workers · Durable Objects · KV · D1 (where workload fits)
    Storage
    R2 · S3-compatible · zero egress fees · monthly cron syncs
    Routing
    Single Redirect Rules · Bulk Redirects · wildcard fallbacks
    Security
    WAF · Rate Limiting · Managed Challenge → Block escalation · ASN + geo
    Hosting
    Cloudflare Pages · static + Next.js builds with Workers in front

    ■ If Cloudflare is on but only as DNS

    Bring the bill, the URL shapes, or the bot pattern. We'll show what the edge can absorb.

    Talk to an edge engineer

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