But is it actually an OS?
Is Chrome?
Does chrome claim to be an OS? or are you talking about chrome os which is an OS built on top of a Linux kernel, kind of like ubuntu or redhat
Cloudflare OS: an open platform for agents, apps, and work
151–160 of 365 posts
Re: Cloudflare OS: an open platform for agents, apps, and work
#152Earlier 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.
What do you mean? This is 100% open source and self-hostable! https://github.com/cloudflare/cloudflare-os It runs on the open source Workers Runtime: https://github.com/cloudflare/workerd You can run it at home if you want. There's even a Home Assistant Gatekeeper.
Thank you for your work over the years, sandstorm is a really interesting and inspiring piece of software. I'll certainly try to self-host CloudflareOS.
Re: Cloudflare OS: an open platform for agents, apps, and work
#153I 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…
Oh, wow! This is a lot clearer to me. I've long had a soft spot in my heart about Sandstorm. Here's a comment[0] I made 11 years ago about what Sandstorm was, to me: > I'm a web developer, but I can't really use my skills to provide an open source web app the way I'd like to. I'd like to build a small server-side budgeting app that people can use from their computers or phones to record expenses, but there's no way I…
For what it's worth we (the community still working on Sandstorm) are also about to release an updated version of Sandstorm. But also as someone who definitely will still be running Sandstorm at home, some of the Cloudflare OS stuff is super exciting to me, and probably well beyond what we'll tackle with Sandstorm any time soon. What Kenton's doing with gatekeepers is insanely cool.
Re: Cloudflare OS: an open platform for agents, apps, and work
#154Why are companies slapping "OS" in their product naming? it's stupid
I agree, it has now become a cliche buzzword that product managers slap on boring non-technical things to make them sound important.
Isn’t there even a bug tracker that some company calls an ‘issue OS’ or something absurd?
Re: Cloudflare OS: an open platform for agents, apps, and work
#155Why 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.
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Re: Cloudflare OS: an open platform for agents, apps, and work
#156Why are companies slapping "OS" in their product naming? it's stupid
From the GitHub page: This is not a traditional computer operating system. We use the term "operating system" in two senses: - An operating system for the company to be productive with AI, in a way that is safe, so that the security team can sleep at night. - An operating system for AI workloads, analogous to the sense in which a traditional operating system manages compute workloads.
It's awful naming if they have to explain it.
Re: Cloudflare OS: an open platform for agents, apps, and work
#157Earlier 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.
My approach has been an interpreted Lisp running on a web server backend and it basically does everything described here
Re: Cloudflare OS: an open platform for agents, apps, and work
#158Everytime 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?
This is 100% open source and self-hostable. https://github.com/cloudflare/cloudflare-os It runs on top of our open source runtime. https://github.com/cloudflare/workerd
Can I host outside Cloudflare?
Re: Cloudflare OS: an open platform for agents, apps, and work
#159Why are companies slapping "OS" in their product naming? it's stupid
From the GitHub page: This is not a traditional computer operating system. We use the term "operating system" in two senses: - An operating system for the company to be productive with AI, in a way that is safe, so that the security team can sleep at night. - An operating system for AI workloads, analogous to the sense in which a traditional operating system manages compute workloads.
the people criticizing the vibecoded name knows what they meant, it is just not correct. It is the same as vegan meat.
Re: Cloudflare OS: an open platform for agents, apps, and work
#160Earlier 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.
Workers is a product and you're paid to develop and sell it as an employee.
I 100% understand the hustle. I do the same thing. I just don't trust a giant like Cloudflare that has done several things to weaken the open web and establish a position that is all too powerful. I don't want to give them an iota of support. Even using open source buys into their mindshare, distribution, ecosystem, and eventual supremacy and lock-in.
I'd buy this from a smaller company for sure. Just not from Google, AWS, Cloudflare.
If this was a YC startup I'd have given you my credit card info already.
I don't know what your stock in Cloudflare is like, but your upside would be way bigger building this externally. You'd probably raise an extremely large seed round.
Consider launching your own startup. Don't give Cloudflare all the upside.
Edit: I didn't realize you'd already responded. Was clarifying my position and wishes for this to not be something made by Cloudflare.