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Cloudflare acquires Astro

astro.build

231–240 of 409 posts

Re: Cloudflare acquires Astro

#231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

Re: Cloudflare acquires Astro

#232

Oh no. This isn’t good. I’m glad that the team gets a payout but as an Astro user I don’t love it being owned by CF and that the goals of the project (at least indirectly) goes from the best way to deploy it to the best way to deploy it using CF.

I don't anticipate it changing like that. You still do a build using Vite and deploy the static assets. How could they change that to make it difficult to host elsewhere?

Let’s hope you’re right. I think vendor lock in is possible if they focus on features tightly coupled to Cloudflare. Look at Next.js. In theory you can deploy it anywhere, but in practice it is harder outside Vercel because of tight coupling around things like caching. You do not have to use those features, but if the framework is built to expect them, it pushes people into that platform. I can imagine Astro becoming very attractive to use with Cloudflare Workers and slowly locking people into that model.

Re: Cloudflare acquires Astro

#234

Great for Astro.. About the download stats for open source frameworks and libraries.. I keep reading claims of "millions of weekly downloads" -- surely this is a noisy metric, right? NPM just counts GET requests. A significant number of those must be from CI/CD pipelines, mirrors, build servers, etc. It still signals popularity, but probably to a much lesser degree than implied.

How to measure the popularity of FOSS projects though? Number of downloads? Number of stars on GH? Number of content on social medias? The absolute value is meaningless in itself, but there's a big difference between a library that is downloaded a thousand or millions of times each week. That's the idea. Meanwhile for-profit projects have actual customers or revenues to demonstrate popularity.

Availability in Debian, is the measure I personally use.

Re: Cloudflare acquires Astro

#235
post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. Nex…

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.

Re: Cloudflare acquires Astro

#237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

cf. would invite a fair bit of confusion on an article about cloudflare

I agree! That's why I think it's probably just a confusion between entities. It doesn't make sense either as example or as a comparison (although IMO it makes more sense as the latter). (For the OP: I'm sorry if I misinterpreted you.)

It's all good. Hardly matters. It was just becoming too big a discussion for something far too minor. Any frustration I had from being misunderstood (primarily self-directed) was alleviated from satvikpendem guessing correctly what I intended.

Re: Cloudflare acquires Astro

#238
post #166

Very nice to see these dev tools get an exit. e.g. I love `uv` and friends but did consider that perhaps dev tools are just a bad business and then no one will go into making that kind of stuff. Good exits means more of these tools. I have only used Astro for toy stuff but it seemed neat. Congrats to the team. EDIT: To put paid to the sidebar discussion below, yes I meant "for instance, consider `uv`; they might do t…

i'm interpreting this in the reverse

if dev tools can only be "monetized" by being bought out, it does not feel sustainable on any level

we will see companies attempt to do things like close source these projects, go subscription based, or just straight up drop support

there is no incentives for cloudflare to make astro better, or even keep it around

same goes with bun, svelte, and i'm sure countless others

Re: Cloudflare acquires Astro

#239
post #95

Astro on Cloudflare workers has been my goto stack for multiple years now. I am very happy with it, and hope this makes the integration stronger. Now we just need Cloudflare to buy one of the DBaaS companies so they have a solid relational offering.

What about Cloudflare D1?

D1 is fine when it fits the use case, but most of the time I just want Postgres that I will use for absolutely everything. It has happened often enough that I have tried to make systems work with other storage systems, and eventually just give up and revert to Postgres. Every time I just start with Postgres I don't have issues until it turns out my laziness has caused a performance problem, and those I can fix.
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