Redefining fleet management at Cloudflare

What this post added

This post introduces 'Zinc,' an in-house infrastructure system built in Rust for comprehensive fleet management. Zinc models logical and physical infrastructure assets (servers, network devices, data centers) and provides APIs and interfaces for efficient fleet management, including workload assignment, maintenance scheduling, and repair cycle management. It automates processes like repair ticket generation and maintenance window orchestration, integrating with systems like Netbox for physical inventory and INAT for diagnostics. Zinc also enhances engineer productivity through a web interface and CLI for complex queries and changes, ensuring scoped and authenticated access to production infrastructure. This represents a significant evolution in managing Cloudflare's growing hardware infrastructure at scale.