Cloudflare Bot Management: machine learning and more
This post introduces the Cloudflare Bot Management platform, detailing its product and technical requirements. It defines key terms like 'Bot', 'Good bots', 'Bad bots', 'Bot Management', and 'WAF'. The core innovation presented is the 'Score', a unified metric (0-100) indicating the likelihood of a request being human-generated. This score is integrated into Firewall Rules via the `cf.bot_management.score` field, enabling flexible and real-time bot mitigation. The post also outlines the platform's architecture, highlighting its microservices, data stores (Kafka, ClickHouse, Postgres, Redis, Ceph), programming languages (Go, Rust, Python, Java, Bash), and containerization technologies (Docker, Kubernetes). It details the output of the edge Bot Management module, including firewall fields, cookies (cf_bm), and JS challenges.
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