Comment by philipallstar
1 day ago
It would be good to understand what Cloudflare gets out of the deal. The article is very much just "Astro, but someone else pays the bills!" which is of course lovely for Astro.
1 day ago
It would be good to understand what Cloudflare gets out of the deal. The article is very much just "Astro, but someone else pays the bills!" which is of course lovely for Astro.
Same reason vercel buys open source... it makes cloudflare always a great deployment option for all Astro sites, which in turn helps cloudflare's core business.
For example, Cloudflare released their vite plugin which makes it effortless for frameworks that use the vite env API to run inside workerd (meaning you get to use cloudflare service bindings in dev) back in April and only React Router had support for it. Nextjs has no support, the draft PR to add support for Sveltekit has been parked until the next major version, Astro only just added support in their beta 6.0 release 3 days ago
With this acquisition, Astro will probably be first to future updates that increase compatibility with cloudflare. It's smart, and was probably not very expensive (more of an acqui-hire)
So when folks say they want to see big companies invest in open source, this is what that looks like. CF could have kept coasting on what Astro was building, but instead they are paying for it. But in return they get a lot of control.
Well, hopefully more like Go's relationship with Google? The company that pays the bills is their first and most important customer, but as far as I can tell from the outside, the Go team makes its own plans and management doesn't pull rank.
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> CF could have kept coasting on what Astro was building, but instead they are paying for it. But in return they get a lot of control.
Supabase pioneered the modern implementation of this model. Probably, RedHat before it? Google also tend to "acquihire" maintainers of popular FOSS projects, like Ben Goodger (Firefox), Scott Remnant (Upstart), Junio Hamano (Git), Guido von Rossum (Python).
So, cloudification: lock the customer into a complex cloud dependent solution they can't easily migrate to some other commodity infrastructure provider.
The easier/convenient a cloud makes it for a business to use, the more the industry will continue to trend towards lock in
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What lock in? They explicitly said:
> Staying open to all was a non-negotiable requirement for both us and for Cloudflare.
They have deployment guides for practically every provider out there: https://docs.astro.build/en/guides/deploy/
And at the end of the day, most of the deployment is just deploying a static site... Which you can do practically anywhere.
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No? It's still the same Astro that you can move to any other provider that supports it - and it's just Javascript, so pretty much everyone supports it.
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> Nextjs has no support
From what I remember, you can't even run a NextJS app through vite?
Yes, that's part of the problem, deploying nextjs to cloudflare in the first place used to be an absolute nightmare, let alone the dev experience (I think it's better now)
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That doesn't sound too preposterous; I wouldn't assume you'd be able to run a React Router project on Turbopack or Webpack either, and Next.js I think has a way more intricate dependence on the bundler to power a significant chunk of its features.
This is insane to me, and validates my irrational dislike of next.
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I use Astro so I could make my blog a static site and deploy it to Cloudflare pages.
I was impressed since I got interactive compilation and state tracking of how many exercises the user completed.
https://jjmarr.com/blog/structured-bindings-structs/
I have a question. Why can't Whatsapp or Meta make a markdown INFO only website for small business owners (e.g. technicians, shopkeepers, handyman, etc) using their immense reach and clout. The method of using whatsapp groups to keep users updated of the latest updates is not scalable or open.
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This reads like marketing copy. Maybe it reflects your actual feelings but it's hard to imagine that if you don't write like a human.
It does not read like marketing copy to me, what part of talking about draft PRs and framrworks sounds like marketing speak? They're right that CloudFlare having priority access to new Astro features is beneficial for them.
Not sure how to feel about this! I’ve been known to use em dashes every now and then, but I am indeed a fellow human.
I’m close to the vite plugin in particular and have contributed to multiple frameworks around cf integration (simply because I use cf), that’s why I chose it as an example (and it’s one of Astro 6’s biggest features)
What a bizarre comment. What part of it was "not human" in your opinion?
It's obvious when you look at https://astro.build/blog/astro-6-beta/ and see "Cloudflare" sprinkled everywhere in the article.
They get to make Astro -> Cloudflare the default publishing pipeline. Sure users may pick something else, but even if a small % stick with Cloudflare that's an overall win.
I expected something clearer in the blog post about deploying Astro on Cloudflare Pages, as I imagine many Astro users (like me) are on Netlify.
I think every deployment pipeline having it's own preferred UI framework (and CMS, and cloud-DB solution) makes a lot of sense.
Why did you expect info about deploying Astro to Cloudflare Pages? It's been supported for a long time already.
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None of us have access to Cloudflare's internal data. But a reasonable guess is that enough of their current and future paying customers use Astro? I'm one of those - Astro hosted on Cloudflare.
What does Vercel get out of Next.js? Just default integration of overpriced cloud infra.
Vercel was founded (or co-founded?) by the author of Next.js. That's a very different story. Vercel is like what some hypothetical Astro Cloud could have become if it had grown out of Astro.
"I don't care, it's a stupid question."
It gets to be THE platform where to deploy frontends for many headless enterprise CMS and comerce stores that due to partnerships with Vercel only have Next.js based SDKs.
Additionally, I wish more serveless cloud vendors would offer a free tier like Vercel, including support for compiled languages on the backend (C, C++, Rust, Go) without asking me for a credit card upfront.
Sometimes it is cheaper to buy a company than build the internal tool team you might have had to build from scratch anyway. Half acqui-hire, half knowing you've built something on-top of it and want it to stick around.
I also wouldn't be surprised if cloudflare wants to build this into their site-hosting capabilities.
Mindshare with developers is what cloudflare gets
Probably better support for CF Workers/Pages and better integration with Wrangler.
Cloudflare definitely gets positive PR out of this which makes people forget their CEO's recent meltdown on twitter.
The "meltdown" where he refused to jump to the whims of Italy's football cartel and block whatever addresses they wanted without accountability or review? More meltdowns, please.
A meltdown is a meltdown.
Cloudflare is bound to respect the laws of the countries it operates, and if he disagrees with the process, understandable, that was not the way to express it.
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https://www.tumblr.com/ourincrediblejourney
This is probably just an acquihire.
Advertise their solution? Now astro can put them into the main deploying option and that's a good way for cloudfare to acquire new customers
I for one host several Astro sites on Cloudflare Pages.
Its quite a nice DX actually.
I could see Cloudflare just wanting to push for a bit more vertical integration in the space to give themselves some more options.
VMware maintained spring framework for many years. It was good ( as a user)
Nextjs doesn’t really work on cloudflare with the latest versions. There is an adapter but it’s buggy as hell. The direction is also likely to continue: https://omarabid.com/nextjs-vercel
Source: I use cloudflare and used to run my app there (nextjs) and had to do a migration to vite.js. So the way I see it, this is cloudflare response to vercel.
My god. Every time I touch Next.js in some project I think “hey, this actually doesn’t feel so bad to develop with, dare I say it feels nice?“ and every time I read about it I think “what the hell, this is the worst choice you can make“.
It’s wild that they’re somewhat taking the whole React ecosystem with them.
Following your link, the fault for this appears to lie entirely with Vercel management.
Cross fingers that CloudFlare never try similar lock-in games, now that they control Astro?
I don’t think so since they are using the worker model. My guess is that the first class support will go to that. Though they can do lockin differently (kv, queues, etc..)
Feels like they are trying to do vertical integration on the whole stack and compete with Vercel.
For me, anyone that tries to compete with Vercel has to beat their offering in backend runtimes.
cloudflare wants to be vercel
Cloudflare wants to be worth much less?