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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)

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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.

Definitely!

You know this because you work on the Go team or part of google management?

> as far as I can tell from the outside

Anyone with actual knowledge, feel free to chime in.

> 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

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.

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.

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.

Once again, it’s a static site builder. How, exactly, would they “stop supporting deploying to cloudflare’s competitors”? Be specific.

The same ways Vercel makes it harder to deploy Next.js sites to competitors or for self hosting.

Next.js isn't just a static site generator.

Astro isn't just a static site generator either. Not sure what your point is.

Vercel does not make Next.js hard to deploy elsewhere. Next.js runs fine on serverful platforms like Railway, Render, and Heroku. I have run a production Next.js SaaS on Railway for years with no issues.

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.

0. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sIVL4JMqRfc

So it is vendor locked by Vercel. That's why there is OpenNext - https://opennext.js.org/

How is it vendor locked?

Recent features are more dependent on Vercel and it's OpenNext that makes it platform independent with adapters.

Can you describe what you mean here? Because I have heard this about 100 times and never understood what people mean when they say this. I am hosting a NextJS site without Vercel and I had no special consideration for it.

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.

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.

For now.

> 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)

Wasn't this a decision made by Vercel to incentivize people using Vercel for NextJS apps? I can't recall.

It's gotten a lot better since last year with OpenNext. Last I tested was Next.js 15 though. Who knows what Vercel has broken with Next.js 16.

https://opennext.js.org/cloudflare

This is insane to me, and validates my irrational dislike of next.

100% rational. Nuxt/Astro FTW.

Definitely irrational. There are lots of logical reasons to dislike Next (like the fact that they pile new shiny bit on top of new shiny bit without caring about the regular user experience) ... but being mad that it can't run on Vite is silly.

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.

Isn’t the next.js build system known for being slow/memory hungry?

For those stuck in the past yes, they have replaced it with a Rust based toolchain, as is so fashionable nowadays.

Luckily DX is much better now with Turbopack as a bundler. First they improved the dev server, now with Turbo builds the production builds are faster as well. Still not fully stable in my opinion, but they will get there.

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. :)

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.

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.

too big to deliver simple solutions? youre making way too much sense and this would die in committee or be replaced when someone new needs to justify themselves by launching a new product to supplant an existing one.

Because they much rather have those small businesses use a Facebook page for that purpose, which is the status quo in the West.

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.

What a bizarre comment. What part of it was "not human" in your opinion?

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)

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