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Cloudflare One Appliance Can Now Be Restarted or Shut Down From the Dashboard!

Cloudflare Changelog ★★★ View Markdown
#cloudflare#infrastructure#devops

Hi everyone, I'm Shiichan! Today I found some good news for anyone running Cloudflare One at their site!

Cloudflare Changelog developers.cloudflare.com

What was announced?

The Cloudflare Changelog announced that you can now restart, reboot, or shut down a Cloudflare One Appliance directly from the dashboard or via the API. A Cloudflare One Appliance is a connector device that links your on-site network to Cloudflare's network. With this update, you can now send three types of operations to that appliance remotely.

The story so far

A Cloudflare One Appliance sits at your office or data center, so if something started acting up, you'd typically need to go on-site or connect directly to a console to fix it. Sending someone over every time there's a minor hiccup is a hassle. With this update, you can now send these operations remotely from the dashboard or the API instead.

What changes

There are three operations you can now send.

  • Restart — Restarts the managed services. Purges temporary state, and optionally purges persistent state too
  • Reboot — Power-cycles the appliance itself. Optionally purges persistent state, and re-applies the configuration from scratch
  • Shutdown — Powers off the appliance. Optionally purges persistent state. It stays offline until someone powers it back on manually

You can pick the right level of response depending on how serious the issue is: just restart the services, power-cycle the whole box, or shut it down completely. You can also choose whether to purge persistent state, so you can either do a light fix while keeping the configuration, or wipe things clean and start over. Being able to respond precisely from the dashboard or API, without dispatching anyone on-site, is a real win.

Dive Deep

There are two ways to send an operation.

  • Dashboard — Go to Networking > Connectors > Appliances, select the appliance, then use Edit > Operations to send the operation
  • API — POST to the /accounts/{account_id}/magic/connectors/{connector_id}/interrupts endpoint

It's a fun detail that the API endpoint is named interrupts. Full details are apparently covered in the "Appliance operations" documentation.

Wrap-up

  • You can now restart, reboot, or shut down a Cloudflare One Appliance remotely from the dashboard or API
  • Restart affects only the managed services, reboot power-cycles the device, and shutdown powers it off, giving you a graduated range of impact
  • Each operation lets you optionally purge persistent state
  • The API is just a POST to /accounts/{account_id}/magic/connectors/{connector_id}/interrupts

If you run a Cloudflare One Appliance for Magic WAN or similar at your site, this is a small but genuinely handy feature since it means you don't have to go on-site!

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