Live data from Hacker News

Cloudflare acquires Astro

astro.build

41–50 of 409 posts

Re: Cloudflare acquires Astro

#41
post #24

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.

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.

Re: Cloudflare acquires Astro

#42

> In 2021, Astro was born out of frustration. The trend at the time was that every website should be architected as an application, and then shipped to the user’s browser to render. Was it? Hot damn, I knew it'll eventually happen, but we truly are just running around in circles. Eventually these same people will do the same loop around, creating new frameworks because the current "server client" model suddenly doesn…

It gets worse, some teams would get x real estate on a website, and one team would use React, another Vue, another would use Angular because they owned that real estate on your site and that's what the team was best with. Astro lets you still do that, but turns it all into static content. Think of orgs the size of Google or YouTube, there are different teams responsible for what looks like a small thing but different pieces of a giant pie.

Re: Cloudflare acquires Astro

#43
post #35

I like the idea behind Astro, I've used it for a couple websites here and there. I'm a bit worried about the complexity brought by Astro supporting all these different frameworks through its adapters, and how stable and maintainable those websites will be in the future. For instance: I've been using Astro with Svelte to build static sites with some components that require client-side interactivity. I really like that…

It's not complaining when said OSS project has taken $10+million in VC funding, at that point it becomes a matter of priorities and by explicitly ignoring a major issue the owners are telling you exactly what they care about (capturing that bag, not helping users).

Re: Cloudflare acquires Astro

#44

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.

https://www.tumblr.com/ourincrediblejourney

This is probably just an acquihire.

Re: Cloudflare acquires Astro

#45
post #35

I like the idea behind Astro, I've used it for a couple websites here and there. I'm a bit worried about the complexity brought by Astro supporting all these different frameworks through its adapters, and how stable and maintainable those websites will be in the future. For instance: I've been using Astro with Svelte to build static sites with some components that require client-side interactivity. I really like that…

I havent had a chance to fully use it in a project yet, but it is one of my favorite projects only tinker with it, I'm glad it will receive funding to keep it going. It is definitely a solid gem of open source since its not married to one single SPA framework.

Yeah I suppose it's a tradeoff. I have had an excellent experience when not hydrating components at all, and I like their approach significantly more than other SSGs overall. My worry is just the massive scope of supporting integrations with all those frameworks AND its own .astro language / syntax AND server side rendering in addition to static generation.

Re: Cloudflare acquires Astro

#47
post #24

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.

What does Vercel get out of Next.js? Just default integration of overpriced cloud infra.

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.

Re: Cloudflare acquires Astro

#48

I am very disappointed with Astro. Who is this framework for? It's been years, and they still don't support unit testing Astro Actions. They still don't support inter-island communication. "Astro v6 is around the corner" - and the only changes are 1. refactored CLI (why? it's perfectly fine) 2. bumped zod to v4 It's great if you want to build a blog or something, but it's definitely far from great for building apps .…

On inter-island communication, I actually think less is more – I find a lot of the recent big features like this they have added unnecessarily constrain you to doing things a certain way, while the reason I liked Astro in the first place was the simplicity.

You can easily add any global store library to your project to communicate between islands from the very simple (nanostores) to more complex stuff (are people still using mobx, redux, etc?)

I actually would prefer if Astro kept the core more simple, I never understood the point of Astro components for example; always thought their game plan would be to build their own client-side framework like what remix v3 is doing, but currently their components are too limited to make them worth using over just doing everything in react, svelte, or whatever floats your boat.

Re: Cloudflare acquires Astro

#49

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.

Probably better support for CF Workers/Pages and better integration with Wrangler.

Re: Cloudflare acquires Astro

#50

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.

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.
Post reply on HN