Comment by mmooss
22 days ago
I don't understand how Cloudflare's bottom line benefits:
Some here say they gain Astro users, that Cloudflare will become part of the default deployment. But given Cloudflare's current scale, how much are Astro's users worth? Is it even worth the distraction for Cloudflare? Companies lose energy to lots of small, low-value operations.
Most acquisitions begin with announcments that nothing will change, in order to retain customers and employees. They say '<acquistion> is so great, we don't want to interfere, and we're keeping existing management and letting them run things'. After the transition period - often 1 year - the old managers leave and the big changes happen, sometimes including shutting down the product because it was an acqui-hire all along or an IP acquisition.
It seems like Cloudflare must perceive some profit beyond what is announced.
It's very powerful to have ownership over a framework that many developers are familiar and like!
It might not be clear just yet what the path to monetization looks like but an easy example would be deeper integrations with the rest of the Cloudflare ecosystem (for example allowing R2 to be easily along with something like duckdb to live in a world of truly local analytics or something like that).
It seems like these great open source frameworks need to monetize by building a platform around the product but these days it's hyper competitive (ex. Vercel, Cloudflare) and it's hard to get started without an incredible differentiator. So, while monetizing independently as a company might be difficult, Astro can provide a lot of value to the rest of the Cloudflare ecosystem.
Why does Vercel provide Next.js? Aside from talent & tightly coupling Astro to their services, their North Star might be similar to Weekly Number of New Domains Hosted On Cloudflare. Sponsoring a framework that helps ship performant websites feeds into that metric.
I have no inside knowledge, though.
Vercel is a platform that, simplified, sells compute by time and by query.
Static optimized sites take very little compute, and little queries.
Since they have the most used framework (nextjs), they made it more server-heavy and changed the paradigm to one where a single page is built up using multiple queries for even just the html.
They then made sure that self hosting that monstrosity is terribly complex for anything serious, and incompatible with the "serverless environment" of their own platform, unless you have devops maintaining it.
And then they severely overhauled the pricing and gimped the included limits. (We were on <1% usage before. And now at 95%< while changing nothing...)
It could of course be a coincidence, but if that were the case, they would be very bad, yet lucky, business people.
100% will never put anything new on vercel and have been avoiding nextjs like the plague.
They get control and market differentiation. There will probably be a CloudFlare Astro CMS offering.
I personally would like a highly managed Astro solution. Astro is simple but highly extendable.
I can only hope they wean themselves off NPM somehow.
Yeah I see the benefit right off the bat, this is a direct head to Vercel and NextJS.
With that said, I have no idea on the market share or profitability of any of that or Cloudflare vs Vercel.
Also perhaps the rails that will be put in place for seamless 1 click Astro deploy will continue to push them forward with other technologies as well, so it's not just about Astro.
I do feel that fear as well, is this an unnecessary distraction for CloudFlare? Time will tell.
vertical integration probably, if you sell web services helping people get to the point that they need them is worth
buying into something that becomes popular is good advertising for cheap (react is probably the only reason for any kind of goodwill at all towards facebook)
as a function of earnings this is a rounding error purchase for them
More devs get acquainted with Cloudflare.
Cloudflare is becoming an alternative for Azure, AWS, ... Many don't realize it yet, because they don't know what Cloudflare is offering.
Developer goodwill. And it probably cost a song.
marketshare ???
like do you understand which company doing the same thing ????? Vercel is
now we talking, cloudflare want to extend their portofolio and product offering by integrate from top to bottom like vercel does
its doens't make sense/oblivious because we view it as standalone product rather than entire suite of product offering that well integrate vertically