2025-03-20
5 min read
It’s a big day here at Cloudflare! Not only is it Security Week, but today marks Cloudflare’s first step into a completely new area of functionality, intended to improve how our users both interact with, and get value from, all of our products.
We’re excited to share a first glance of how we’re embedding AI features into the management of Cloudflare products you know and love. Our first mission? Focus on security and streamline the rule and policy management experience. The goal is to automate away the time-consuming task of manually reviewing and contextualizing Custom Rules in Cloudflare WAF, and Gateway policies in Cloudflare One, so you can instantly understand what each policy does, what gaps they have, and what you need to do to fix them.
Meet Cloudy, Cloudflare’s first AI agent
Our initial step toward a fully AI-enabled product experience is the introduction of Cloudy, the first version of Cloudflare AI agents, assistant-like functionality designed to help users quickly understand and improve their Cloudflare configurations in multiple areas of the product suite. You’ll start to see Cloudy functionality seamlessly embedded into two Cloudflare products across the dashboard, which we’ll talk about below.
And while the name Cloudy may be fun and light-hearted, our goals are more serious: Bring Cloudy and AI-powered functionality to every corner of Cloudflare, and optimize how our users operate and manage their favorite Cloudflare products. Let’s start with two places where Cloudy is now live and available to all customers using the WAF and Gateway products.
Let’s begin with AI-powered overviews of WAF Custom Rules. For those unfamiliar, Cloudflare’s Web Application Firewall (WAF) helps protect web applications from attacks like SQL injection, cross-site scripting (XSS), and other vulnerabilities.
One specific feature of the WAF is the ability to create WAF Custom Rules. These allow users to tailor security policies to block, challenge, or allow traffic based on specific attributes or security criteria.
However, for customers with dozens or even hundreds of rules deployed across their organization, it can be challenging to maintain a clear understanding of their security posture. Rule configurations evolve over time, often managed by different team members, leading to potential inefficiencies and security gaps. What better problem for Cloudy to solve?
Powered by Workers AI, today we’ll share how Cloudy will help review your WAF Custom Rules and provide a summary of what’s configured across them. Cloudy will also help you identify and solve issues such as:
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Identifying redundant rules: Identify when multiple rules are performing the same function, or using similar fields, helping you streamline your configuration.
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Optimising execution order: Spot cases where rules ordering affects functionality, such as when a terminating rule (block/challenge action) prevents subsequent rules from executing.
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Analysing conflicting rules: Detect when rules counteract each other, such as one rule blocking traffic that another rule is designed to allow or log.
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Identifying disabled rules: Highlight potentially important security rules that are in a disabled state, helping ensure that critical protections are not accidentally left inactive.
Cloudy won’t just summarize your rules, either. It will analyze the relationships and interactions between rules to provide actionable recommendations. For security teams managing complex sets of Custom Rules, this means less time spent auditing configurations and more confidence in your security coverage.
Available to all users, we’re excited to show how Cloudflare AI Agents can enhance the usability of our products, st