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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

#341

Post by lern_too_spel »

ignoramous wrote: post #104
thehamkercat wrote: post #2

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

Andy Jassy et al didn't quite name it that, but AWS was being thought of internally as "Internet OS".

AWS as an OS also makes sense to me. An OS abstracts the underlying hardware, so the user doesn't have to worry about other users of that hardware if they don't want to and restrict interaction with other user programs in ways that protect those other programs. This is different from OS-less embedded programming, which does have device driver libraries but does not have an OS. People here seem to have a completely wrong idea of what an OS is and are really adamant about it.

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

#342

Post by alt227 »

radlad wrote: post #322
alt227 wrote: post #301

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You seem to have a wrong definition of operating system in your head. The definition of Operating System is "The main software that manages a computer's hardware and software." An operating system is definitely not "just the interface a user has to the programs they run on their computer." > If you purchase a cloud VM... Then the operating system there is the link between the interface you are accessing and the under…

"The definition"? Whose? There are many definitions of "operating system" and I think it may be you who has it wrong: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operating_system#Definition_an... Having a kernel, drivers, or firmware does not disqualify an operating system focused on LLM-usage from being an "agent operating system." Do you agree that Android is an OS, or would you say that the OS is Linux and Android is simply a d…

No, I disagree with everything you are saying here. You have a very misguided opinion of what an OS is.

You linked the wikipedia page which clearly says OSes are defined by managing resources and have an always running kernel. LLMs do not meet either of these points.

> You seemed to miss the cloud computing point

You seem to misunderstand how VMs work. They are not OSes running on top of OSes, they are multiple OSes sharing the same hardware resources simultaneously side by side.

You also seem to keep avoiding the fact you wrote:

> it's the way I access my LLM. For now.

Inferring that you think soon LLMs will either not need operating systems, or will become them. This is not true at all. LLMs will never boot your hardware into a prompt. The OS will do that and hand off to the LLM. This is the main reason you are getting backlash and being downvoted.

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

#343

Post by pizzafeelsright »

thehamkercat wrote: post #2

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

People do not use an 'OS' anymore. Anything internet is a hundred pieces of hardware over 1000 kilometers apart providing an interface to an application with a KVM (for now)

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

#344

Post by indigodaddy »

kentonv wrote: post #329
indigodaddy wrote: post #320

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How does the cloudflare-based deployment of cfos get updated? If I "redeploy" will it get updates from cfos upstream? Eg, for when you add new stuff like this upstream..

We're adding an update function. Didn't need it yet on day one. :)

Awesome!

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

#345

Post by sparse-Matrix »

I always seem to be 'that guy'... but what this really amounts to is cloudflare enticing the users to go 'all-in' on cloudflare, drawing them into and integrating them with the cloudflare ecosystem in a way from which they will never be able to extricate themselves.

Customer capture at its finest: "Go with us! its a good thing you'll love it because you'll never get away".

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

#346

Post by jLaForest »

kentonv wrote: post #251
taw1285 wrote: post #241

It looks like this product uses pi-agent directly ( https://github.com/cloudflare/cloudflare-os/blob/main/plans/... ). How come Cloudflare is not using their homegrown Agents SDK / Think / Flue harness for this? I am asking genuinely as I am evaluating a harness to build my agent platform.

Flue is actually also built on Pi. We are big Pi fans at Cloudflare. Cloudflare OS uses pi-agent-core, but not pi-coding-agent. pi-agent-core, at least the way CFOS uses it right now, is more of an LLM API compatibility layer than a full harness. All the tools and things like compaction are implemented by CFOS itself. The code was actually using ai-sdk (from Vercel) up until a few days ago, when I switched it over to…

thanks for being responsive in the comments, its great to hear from the people behind the products. One interesting takeaway for me is that cloudflare does less than a few days of SVT before releasing a public product. Not trying to be critical, i just think its a sign of the times that theres so much pressure to release new products that proper SVT is skipped.

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

#347

Post by radlad »

alt227 wrote: post #342
radlad wrote: post #322

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"The definition"? Whose? There are many definitions of "operating system" and I think it may be you who has it wrong: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operating_system#Definition_an... Having a kernel, drivers, or firmware does not disqualify an operating system focused on LLM-usage from being an "agent operating system." Do you agree that Android is an OS, or would you say that the OS is Linux and Android is simply a d…

No, I disagree with everything you are saying here. You have a very misguided opinion of what an OS is. You linked the wikipedia page which clearly says OSes are defined by managing resources and have an always running kernel. LLMs do not meet either of these points. > You seemed to miss the cloud computing point You seem to misunderstand how VMs work. They are not OSes running on top of OSes, they are multiple OSes…

Are we reading the same Wikipedia page?

> An operating system is difficult to define,[7] but has been called "the layer of software that manages a computer's resources for its users and their applications".[8] Operating systems include the software that is always running, called a kernel—but can include other software as well.[7][9] The two other types of programs that can run on a computer are system programs—which are associated with the operating system, but may not be part of the kernel—and applications—all other software.[9]

> You seem to misunderstand how VMs work. They are not OSes running on top of OSes, they are multiple OSes sharing the same hardware resources simultaneously side by side.

This is not strictly true. VirtualBox, VMware Workstation, QEMU run guests on the host. Even KVM operates in tandem with the host kernel. Maybe you're referring to Xen and ESXi VMs?

> Inferring that you think soon LLMs will either not need operating systems, or will become them.

You removed the key point of context:

> I almost do not need a traditional OS anymore. [...] it's the way I access my LLM. For now.

I believe we will move to something that resembles microkernels and/or thin clients. You'll still have something here, but it'll be about as impactful as BIOS is.

> This is the main reason you are getting backlash and being downvoted.

FWIW, I've received a single downvote.

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

#348

Post by AlotOfReading »

kentonv wrote: post #330
csomar wrote: post #312

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Open Source is a marketing term if your solution takes $2m worth of compute or devops time in order to run properly. The idea is, you have a way out if you want to leave. An option. But if leaving costs $x,xxx,xxx then that option was never there for most people. One example is NextJS. It's open source but even CloudFlare couldn't figure out how to run it properly on their platform.

It does not cost $2m of compute to run an instance of Cloudflare OS. I am running it on a random server in my basement.

Another year or two of RAM shortages should go a long way to closing that gap.

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

#349

Post by kentonv »

jLaForest wrote: post #346
kentonv wrote: post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Flue is actually also built on Pi. We are big Pi fans at Cloudflare. Cloudflare OS uses pi-agent-core, but not pi-coding-agent. pi-agent-core, at least the way CFOS uses it right now, is more of an LLM API compatibility layer than a full harness. All the tools and things like compaction are implemented by CFOS itself. The code was actually using ai-sdk (from Vercel) up until a few days ago, when I switched it over to…

thanks for being responsive in the comments, its great to hear from the people behind the products. One interesting takeaway for me is that cloudflare does less than a few days of SVT before releasing a public product. Not trying to be critical, i just think its a sign of the times that theres so much pressure to release new products that proper SVT is skipped.

To be fair the readme is pretty clear that this is "early access" and still in a state of rapid development.

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

#350

Post by kentonv »

sparse-Matrix wrote: post #345

I always seem to be 'that guy'... but what this really amounts to is cloudflare enticing the users to go 'all-in' on cloudflare, drawing them into and integrating them with the cloudflare ecosystem in a way from which they will never be able to extricate themselves. Customer capture at its finest: "Go with us! its a good thing you'll love it because you'll never get away".

Thought experiment: Let's imagine that we actually just want to build a product that provides value to customers. No tricks up our sleeves.

What would we have done differently in that case?

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