Comment by cornholio

1 day ago

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

  • I don't see the relation between those two

    • I essentially do a 1 click deployment for my personal site with Cloudflare.

      I don't want to deal with the cloud infra for my personal site.

      I could, I've done it in corporate, I've done it for my startup 2 years ago. But I'm rusty, I don't know what the latest people are using for configuration, etc.

      Because there is 1 click with CF or Vercel and I don't have to think about it—I don't. If they increase their price it likely wouldn't be enough friction for me dust off the rust.

      I think this is the relation. I'm not locked in, it's just HTML pages, but I am through my own habit energy, tech changing, and what I want to put effort into, which is not infra and serving my site.

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.

  • They can stay open source, but stop putting any effort into supporting deploying to cloudflare's competitors, including accepting PRs for such improvements.

    Or they could add features that only work if you deploy via cloudflare.

    I also take anything said in an acquisition announcement with a grain of salt. It is pretty common for companies to make changes they said they wouldn't a few years after an acquisition.

  • They can say whatever they want, and then do whatever they want. They have no contractual or legal obligation.

    Almost every (it seems) acquisition begins with saying, 'nothing will change and the former management will stay on'. A year later, the former managment leaves and things change dramatically.

  • Yeah. For now.

    • That's always been true. Perhaps even more so as Astro constantly faced an existential battle for a working business. Now they don't have to do that and Cloudflare makes their money on their infra business. Locking Astro up now or in the future gains them very little compared to how much they make with hosted upsell services. [edit: clarity]

    • It's a static site builder. It creates a static site. HTML, CSS, and JS. That you can then upload literally anywhere.

      Once again, what lock in? There is literally nothing to lock in. Explain exactly how they are going to lock somebody in, moreso than the lazy "for now" which you seem to constantly repeat.

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.