10 min read
In this blog post, we are proud to introduce Oxy - our modern proxy framework, developed using the Rust programming language. Oxy is a foundation of several Cloudflare projects, including the Zero Trust Gateway, the iCloud Private Relay second hop proxy, and the internal egress routing service.
Oxy leverages our years of experience building high-load proxies to implement the latest communication protocols, enabling us to effortlessly build sophisticated services that can accommodate massive amounts of daily traffic.
We will be exploring Oxy in greater detail in upcoming technical blog posts, providing a comprehensive and in-depth look at its capabilities and potential applications. For now, let us embark on this journey and discover what Oxy is and how we built it.
What Oxy does
We refer to Oxy as our "next-generation proxy framework". But what do we really mean by “proxy framework”? Picture a server (like NGINX, that reader might be familiar with) that can proxy traffic with an array of protocols, including various predefined common traffic flow scenarios that enable you to route traffic to specific destinations or even egress with a different protocol than the one used for ingress. This server can be configured in many ways for specific flows and boasts tight integration with the surrounding infrastructure, whether telemetry consumers or networking services.
Now, take all of that and add in the ability to programmatically control every aspect of the proxying: protocol decapsulation, traffic analysis, routing, tunneling logic, DNS resolution, and so much more. And this is what Oxy proxy framework is: a feature-rich proxy server tightly integrated with our internal infrastructure that's customizable to meet application requirements, allowing engineers to tweak every component.
This design is in line with our belief in an iterative approach to development, where a basic solution is built first and then gradually improved over time. With Oxy, you can start with a basic solution that can be deployed to our servers and then add additional features as needed, taking advantage of the many extensibility points offered by Oxy. In fact, you can avoid writing any code, besides a few lines of bootstrap boilerplate and get a production-ready server with a wide variety of startup configuration options and traffic flow scenarios.
High-level Oxy architecture
For example, suppose you'd like to implement an HTTP firewall. With Oxy, you can proxy HTTP(S) requests right out of the box, eliminating the need to write any code related to production services, such as request metrics and logs. You simply need to implement an Oxy hook handler for HTTP requests and responses. If you've used Cloudflare Workers before, then you should be familiar with this extensibility model.
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