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

blog.cloudflare.com

111–120 of 365 posts

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

#111

Why 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 looks to me like they just wanted to distinguish their product from other AI agents/sandboxes, so they called it an OS to make it sound bigger and better.

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

#113
post #28

> Cloudflare OS is available today and is open source. Check out the cloudflare-os GitHub repository. You can deploy it into your own Cloudflare account and use your own Access policies, AI Gateway configuration, data, and integrations. In case anybody missed it.

It's open source, but it is so incredibly tied to their platform, that there is no vendor portability, which has made almost every of their product launches post-Workers kind of meh.

workerd is OSS

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

#114
post #76
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…

> is there a real benefit for a Sandstorm grain over a docker style Linux container?

Linux containers are meant to be used by those with significant software engineering skills. Sandstorm was designed to be used, once installed by someone else, by grandma.

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

#115

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?

Not at all too paranoid. Just like people figured out even with elastic everything, compute from Spot instances and all the other things we're supposed to do in AWS, the data out charges between AZ's and Region's still more than made up the cost savings for true resiliency. People are going to figure out relatively similar pricing traps in Cloudflare that are difficult to design around.

If you run an unindexed D1 query, then you get dinged for every row read. If you didn't properly perform scalability testing in non-production, then you'll never know this until you get a bill that you dissect to find out 5 million rows read for a 5 row result, if you even dig that far in the billing.

If you do not use the WebSocket Hibernation API with Durable Objects, then when you spin up a DO and hold open thousands of client WebSockets, you are being billed continuously for the entire time those connections are open—even if zero messages are being sent.

If you keep optimizing for payload size like many do by default but not event frequency (like poll a Worker every second instead of keeping a single stream open), it will show up unpleasantly in the billing.

If you treat KV like a transactional database keeping state, then be aware writes are expensive compared to reads. Pumping high-frequency write traffic into KV will result in exorbitant write operation costs and eventual consistency headaches. High-frequency state mutations belong in Durable Objects, not KV.

Batch your data to minimize request count, aggressively index your SQL queries to minimize row scans, and hibernate your idle persistent connections whenever you can. Doing all this will make your solutions cost efficient, but very locked into their ecosystem.

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

#116
post #3

I am confused... it's not an OS, is it?

https://github.com/cloudflare/cloudflare-os#cloudflare-os-an... 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 workl…

> An operating system for AI workloads, analogous to the sense in which a traditional operating system manages compute workloads.

They have really twisted the definition to fit their marketing here. Operating systems are what allow you to use hardware to interact with software. Their product does nothing comparable to that at all.

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

#117
post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is just if you don't want to host it yourself, no?

Far as I can tell, even if you host it yourself you are still bound to their workers.

which are open sourced [1]. I tried deploying it and had Deepseek v4 Flash create a dumb whiteboarding app.

[1] https://github.com/cloudflare/workerd

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

#119
post #85
post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Does your LLM have hardware drivers in it? this is silly.

Agreed, its like OSes have become so invisible people have actually forgotten what they do.

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

#120

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 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.

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