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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

#141

Post by runtime_terror »

benatkin wrote: post #89
mosura wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sandstorm without self hosting has no interest though. (Edit: see below, where the creator states it _can_ be run locally) Buzz looks like a more reasonable direction than this does.

There is also qm with smol machines. I found this out the long way, by looking at the contributors to qm at https://github.com/yc-software/qm where I found BinSquare, the founder of smol machines. Then I found a tweet about a public instance of it where I could try out having it code something agentically - I'm in the replies here: https://x.com/binsquares/status/2083305704274976819 I guess the lock-in is to Cloudfla…

Workers also supports Python, Rust and anything via WebAssembly (Go, C, etc)

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

#143

Post by ocdtrekkie »

kentonv wrote: post #132
echelon wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

For what it's worth, we also ran workerd inside a Sandstorm grain and not only did it work, it performed well. In the same way some people run Docker to run a single thing inside a VM solely for that thing... you can probably use workerd just to run a single Workers-based thing inside something else... and it'll probably work just swell.

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

#145

Post by everforward »

tinco wrote: post #76
rozenmd wrote: post #4

I liked Kenton's take on this: https://x.com/KentonVarda/status/2084990137180590572?s=20 Text from tweet: Today we are releasing Cloudflare OS, a chatbot with connectors, just like every other tech company is doing. Except actually, it's different. This is a remake of Sandstorm[.]io, my startup from 10 years ago, except this time built on Cloudflare Workers (the platform I've spent the last 9 years building) and deep…

This is really interesting. I built a similar product (not released yet), but it uses Kubernetes as the infrastructure layer instead of Cloudflare OS. I guess all these years later I am left with the same existential question that plagued Sandstorm. What is its relevance in the context of Linux containers? This is not a rhetorical question, is there a real benefit for a Sandstorm grain over a docker style Linux conta…

I don’t think containers, as normally used, provide that much security because so much of what you want to secure is at the boundaries between containers (the network) rather than inside the container itself.

There’s not much point in preventing hyper visor escape style exploits if the agent can just SSH or psql log in to an adjacent container. Likewise there are near infinite ways to do weird things with the network to make stuff happen in another less controlled environment (eg sign up for AWS free account, make VM, do everything on that VM where controls don’t apply).

There are tools to do this, but I’ve never seen anyone package them up in a way that was pleasant to interact with. It’s got the SELinux problem of being useful, but annoying enough that everyone just disables it the second it gets in the way. It’s surprisingly hard to manage what should be able to connect to what as you start scaling out the number of things on the network. Whoops, you forgot that random software embeds its own DNS over HTTPS resolver so the normal DNS profile won’t work and everything crashed kind of issues.

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

#146

Post by EasyMark »

radlad wrote: post #38
thehamkercat wrote: post #2

Why are companies slapping "OS" in their product naming? it's stupid

I think because the idea of an "agent operating system" is starting to feel more and more inevitable. Since I can use AI to: - Pull information from external sources - Transform and/or augment that information - Publish information I almost do not need a traditional OS anymore. This obviously isn't entirely true: I still use it to interact directly with humans, and it's the way I access my LLM. For now.

smells like lock-in to me.

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

#149

Post by ocdtrekkie »

runtime_terror wrote: post #139
kentonv wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Blueprints shouldn't (if I know anything about Kenton) have access to the Internet/external locations without you granting it permission to.

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

#150

Post by QuantumNoodle »

philistine wrote: post #74
kentonv wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We really struggled with how to present this to multiple audiences at once. My tweet thread, and the GitHub readme, is really the presentation intended for the HN crowd. The blog post is for a different audience. https://github.com/cloudflare/cloudflare-os

> The blog post is for a different audience. No one? Like literally, I don't understand a thing of what the blog post is saying. It's vague to the point of meaning nothing. Every piece of text I've seen that explains CloudflareOS is clear except the blog post.

I used to read their blog regularly because it had lots of interesting technical details. Lately, though, there’s less of that, and I can’t quite put my finger on what changed. My guess is that they realized how popular the blog had become and started using that attention more for advertising. There’s nothing wrong with that, but earlier the “advertisements” actually made me want to try things out and bring them back to my team. I even considered applying to work there. Not so much anymore. I’ve even removed it from my RSS feed.

I don’t like offering criticism without a solution, but I’m not really motivated to come up with one here. It looks like employees may read this, so maybe someone will see the feedback.

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