Just signed up for Cloudflare One last week to explore their Zero Trust platform for a new FastAPI microservice project. The sign-up itself is a breeze—almost deceptively simple—but the first week is where the real onboarding happens, and it's a mix of "wow, that's slick" and "okay, now I need to read the docs."
You'll immediately get access to the Zero Trust dashboard. The first step is setting up your first "team" and configuring an identity provider. I used GitHub Teams for my dev crew, and the OAuth setup was straightforward. The UI guides you well, but I made a classic mistake: I didn't map my GitHub team attributes correctly the first time, so my access policies failed silently. Lesson learned: test your IdP connection with a dummy policy first.
Where it gets interesting for us backend folks is the tunnel setup (cloudflared). You'll be deploying a connector, and the configuration feels similar to setting up a reverse proxy. Here's the basic docker-compose snippet I ended up with after some trial and error:
```yaml
services:
cloudflared:
image: cloudflare/cloudflared:latest
command: tunnel run
environment:
- TUNNEL_TOKEN=${CLOUDFLARE_TUNNEL_TOKEN}
restart: unless-stopped
```
Getting that token from the dashboard and linking it properly took a minute. The first time, I missed the step to create a tunnel in the UI *before* generating the token. The docs are good, but you have to follow the sequence exactly.
By day 3-4, I was setting up Access policies and testing them with pytest. The policy builder is powerful, but you'll want to validate logic carefully. I'd recommend creating a "test" application (like a simple internal API endpoint) to pilot your rules before locking down anything critical.
Biggest pitfall? The pricing model for seats vs. included features. It's clear, but you need to plan your team membership early. Also, the logging kicks in immediately, but figuring out which events are where (Access vs. Gateway) takes some clicking.
Overall, a solid first week. The platform feels built for automation, which I love. Just allocate time for proper testing—don't rush the policy setup. The granular control is fantastic once you get past the initial learning curve.