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Cloudflare OS: an open platform for agents, apps, and work

blog.cloudflare.com

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Re: Cloudflare OS: an open platform for agents, apps, and work

#131
post #61
post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That should have been the announcement. The article posted buries the lead. Cloudflare OS reads like almost any other AI knowledge base until midway when apps are introduced and then becomes overly technical with a code snippet.

Random trivia (and something I learned this way myself from an internet reply, though I can't remember when): What gets buried is the "lede". It is a really unusual thing — a deliberate, engineered misspelling of "lead" that leaked into broader use: https://www.merriam-webster.com/wordplay/bury-the-lede-versu... (Not meant as a nit-pick — it's just something that adds really fascinating historical colour to a useful…

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Re: Cloudflare OS: an open platform for agents, apps, and work

#132
post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sandstorm's use of containers was just a means to an end. The real innovation was the fine-grained instances -- each document in its own container. No other container platform did that. But honestly, it didn't work well, because of cold start times and memory usage. It's bad enough when a server takes seconds to start, but if every document you open has a long startup time and uses hundreds of MB of RAM, it's really…

This is far too Cloudflare flavored to be interesting to me. It's using Workers (capital W) and the core Cloudflare primitives. I don't feel safe building on this or touching this. I'd be happier if a startup or neutral party built this in a more agnostic way.

I'm sorry but Workers is the technology that makes this all possible. I don't think I could have built this without Workers as a foundation. (I tried once, with Sandstorm, and like I said, it didn't work well.)

Sometimes you just can't advance the state of the art while also maintaining broad compatibility.

It's all open source, though. You can run the whole stack on your own machine.

Re: Cloudflare OS: an open platform for agents, apps, and work

#133
this is a cool idea, but i suspect will be limited in use cases. the vast majority of people don't want or can't modify their software competently and will rely on others to do that. once you're relying on someone else, they do not want to maintain different copies for every user, that sounds like a maintenance nightmare for admins or else such a new paradigm that it takes a new generation of admins 20 years to get comfortable.

Re: Cloudflare OS: an open platform for agents, apps, and work

#135

Everytime I read about new things from Cloudflare they look really cool but I cannot shake the feeling of not wanting to use them for fear of lock-in, am I too paranoid?

Cloudflare is hit or miss there.

They move pretty quick so they tend to ship a lot of product very quickly that have a lot of potentials. But they are very much MVPs, and you'll hit a lot of limitations that aren't always obvious at first blush. And then it can take years before they mature, at which point they'll pour a ton of resources and they'll go from useless to top tier in like 2 months.

It's really hard to tell.

The Vite plugin for Cloudflare Worker was one of those. It was really rough at first and I wasted hundreds of hours getting stuff working as advertised. And then in a week they fixed all the bugs.

AI Gateway is another. We used it at first because it seemed to check all the boxes, and turns out it had tons of limitations and almost none of the features of other offerings, with very few updates months+. And then recently they basically added all the features it was missing in a few weeks/months and now its good.

Agent SDK too, it was always behind with outdated dependencies and missing features all other agent frameworks had. And then one day they started iterating super fast and now its legitimately good.

You can never tell reading the docs, so you have to try it, curse because you only find the limitations once you're running the thing for real in production, abandon it, then a few months later its everything you could ever want.

I have a love hate relationship with Cloudflare. Mostly love, but still.

Re: Cloudflare OS: an open platform for agents, apps, and work

#138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cloudflare seems mature enough at this point that if you're willing to accept any kind of vendor lock-in, then accepting it through them is likely acceptable. I won't say they're on-par with the big cloud providers, but if they offer the services you need and you'd be willing to lock-in with AWS, etc., then they should be considered. If you're generally opposed to any vendor lock-in, then Cloudflare is definitely a h…

Cloudflare OS does have the important risk-mitigating feature that you can fork it if the vendor becomes hostile to your interests. You can't really do that with managed services like Workers (workerd exists but isn't a drop-in replacement for the entire Workers platform). Whether forking is economical depends, of course, on your scale and on how many others are in the same boat.

in the world of AI, forking is so much easier.

I was messing with a closed source tool from a vendor, and turns out they didn't support my use case (they were Mac only, I needed a Linux version. And I wanted it in a different programming language than they had used for maintenance and performance).

Pointed Fable and Sol at the binary and the symbols (most of the work was through http, to be fair), and a few hours later I had a fully functional version with additional features.

now of course the legality of that being closed source is iffy, but it was for personal use. In this case its open source. Need to run this on another platform ? You probably can get very far with a prompt or two.

Re: Cloudflare OS: an open platform for agents, apps, and work

#139
post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you have a store/list of public blueprints like sandstorm?

Not yet, but that's an obvious direction to take things. :) I'm really excited by the idea that this platform makes it safe to use blueprints that someone else vibe coded, without worrying about whether they checked it for security bugs, etc. Basically if the app works, it works. So yeah, there absolutely should be a marketplace so everyone can try everyone else's stuff. BTW there are three blueprints installed autom…

Couldn't the blueprint exfiltrate incoming data to an external location for example?
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