Announcing Cloudflare for SaaS for Everyone
Written by @Laton, 24 Apr 2021
Article was migrated from WordPress to Vanilla in March 2022
Cloudflare has recently adapted their SSL for SaaS product, which was originally limited only to their Enterprise customers but has now been released publicly. Yesterday they announced their Cloudflare for SaaS solution available to everyone. And to reflect their recent service evolution of the product they have re-named it to: Cloudflare for SaaS.
You may ask yourself: What exactly is SaaS?
Software as a Service (SaaS) is a method of providing software to an end-user where the software is not installed and maintained by the user, but via hosted services (most often through a web browser). Popular examples of such a service include Salesforce, Google Apps, Microsoft Office 365, etc.
Since the 15th of April, they have released their beta stage, which is available for sign up if you submit your request here. Before the introduction of Cloudflare for SaaS, your best bet was for your customer to set up a CNAME record and have them generate a private key and CSR.
On top of that, you would be required to maintain a solution to generate and securely store private keys. But with the introduction of Cloudflare for SaaS, it is now more freely accessible and has provided less of a burden when managing multiple customers.
Cloudflare Workers
Back in January when SSL for SaaS was announced, 80% of beta users were already building their application on Cloudflare workers. But by combining the use of Cloudflare for SaaS with Cloudflare workers, will overall reduce the time and core resources from building your application.
Security
It also has already provided DDoS Protection and Web Application Firewall (WAF) built-in. Alongside the benefits offered to the Enterprise customers at no additional cost.
So, if you want to have more control of your SSL certificate solution and would like a simple but manageable solution, then why not sign up for the beta.
Comments
It would be great if either the blog post or cloudflare's own article could explain concisely what "Cloudflare for SaaS" actually is.
Pure business talk from a sales team with zero technical details. Clearly they are targeting a CXO who hears "SaaS," "easy-to-use," "fast," and "security"
I reckon it depends how you are feeling on any given day. Personally, most days I have SaaS, but other days I prefer to PaaS.
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Post edited with the addition below:
Thanks for the feedback, @willie!
Edit: Sorry if the above doesn't actually get to your point of what exactly is Cloudflare + SaaS together, but maybe the explanation of SaaS and the graphic on the bottom showing what benefits SaaS for Cloudflare provides will help piece together the overall picture. I don't want to change the content too much, but if it's too confusing maybe @Laton can add a summary and few examples of what Cloudflare for SaaS is all about.
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I did see the diagram but it didn't clarify anything for me. I gather that there is a cloudflare product called "Cloudflare for SaaS". I understand what SaaS is, but I was not able to figure out what the "Cloudflare for SaaS" product does, beyond being a caching proxy just like any CDN. Is there a 1 sentence description of what it does (if anything) besides that?
I'm not an expert but before this service if you wanted to use Cloudflare SSL certs you had to setup the domain on their DNS now it seems you just need a CNAME record pointing the domain of the origin server to a domain on their DNS and a call to their API to setup the cert.
I understand that this takes care of the encryption between Cloudflare's CDN and the final clients but if I'm not installing certs on the origin servers it means the traffic between them and the CDN is not encrypted. Am I missing something?
Service as a Service ?