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.
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)
From what I remember, you can't even run a NextJS app through vite?
It's like being mad that Rails can't run on Python, or that React can't run on jQuery. Next already has its own build system, so of course it doesn't work with another build system.
It's also wise to use monorepo orchestration with build caching like Turborepo.
They did well on the turbo stuff, no doubt about it.
The main bottleneck with big projects in my experience is Typescript. Looking forward to the Go rewrite. :)
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
What Vercel really did was make Next.js work well in serverless environments, which involves a lot of custom infrastructure [0]. Cloudflare wanted that same behavior on CF Workers, but Vercel never open-sourced how they do it, and that is not really their responsibility.
Next.js is not locked to Vercel. The friction shows up when trying to run it in a serverless model without building the same kind of platform Vercel has.
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.
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)
I was impressed since I got interactive compilation and state tracking of how many exercises the user completed.
Anyone with actual knowledge, feel free to chime in.
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).
I think every deployment pipeline having it's own preferred UI framework (and CMS, and cloud-DB solution) makes a lot of sense.
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.
It’s wild that they’re somewhat taking the whole React ecosystem with them.
Cross fingers that CloudFlare never try similar lock-in games, now that they control Astro?
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.
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.
I also wouldn't be surprised if cloudflare wants to build this into their site-hosting capabilities.
This is probably just an acquihire.
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.