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Re:Cloudflare acquires Astro by philipallstar on Friday January 16, 2026 @09:50AM (#46646887)
It would be good to understand what Cloudflare gets out of the deal. The article is very much just "Astro, but someone else pays the bills!" which is of course lovely for Astro.
Re:Cloudflare acquires Astro by mpeg on Friday January 16, 2026 @09:58AM (#46646987)
Same reason vercel buys open source... it makes cloudflare always a great deployment option for all Astro sites, which in turn helps cloudflare's core business.

For example, Cloudflare released their vite plugin which makes it effortless for frameworks that use the vite env API to run inside workerd (meaning you get to use cloudflare service bindings in dev) back in April and only React Router had support for it. Nextjs has no support, the draft PR to add support for Sveltekit has been parked until the next major version, Astro only just added support in their beta 6.0 release 3 days ago

With this acquisition, Astro will probably be first to future updates that increase compatibility with cloudflare. It's smart, and was probably not very expensive (more of an acqui-hire)

Re:Cloudflare acquires Astro by jjmarr on Friday January 16, 2026 @12:19PM (#46648955)
I use Astro so I could make my blog a static site and deploy it to Cloudflare pages.

I was impressed since I got interactive compilation and state tracking of how many exercises the user completed.

https://jjmarr.com/blog/structured-bindings-structs/

Re:Cloudflare acquires Astro by slfreference on Friday January 16, 2026 @12:35PM (#46649177)
I have a question. Why can't Whatsapp or Meta make a markdown INFO only website for small business owners (e.g. technicians, shopkeepers, handyman, etc) using their immense reach and clout. The method of using whatsapp groups to keep users updated of the latest updates is not scalable or open.
Re:Cloudflare acquires Astro by basch on Friday January 16, 2026 @12:50PM (#46649385)
too big to deliver simple solutions? youre making way too much sense and this would die in committee or be replaced when someone new needs to justify themselves by launching a new product to supplant an existing one.
Re:Cloudflare acquires Astro by deaux on Friday January 16, 2026 @09:46PM (#46654792)
Because they much rather have those small businesses use a Facebook page for that purpose, which is the status quo in the West.
Re:Cloudflare acquires Astro by cornholio on Friday January 16, 2026 @11:45AM (#46648481)
So, cloudification: lock the customer into a complex cloud dependent solution they can't easily migrate to some other commodity infrastructure provider.
Re:Cloudflare acquires Astro by taraindara on Friday January 16, 2026 @12:18PM (#46648941)
The easier/convenient a cloud makes it for a business to use, the more the industry will continue to trend towards lock in
Re:Cloudflare acquires Astro by ghurtado on Friday January 16, 2026 @12:31PM (#46649119)
I don't see the relation between those two
Re:Cloudflare acquires Astro by mikodin on Saturday January 17, 2026 @12:14AM (#46655480)
I essentially do a 1 click deployment for my personal site with Cloudflare.

I don't want to deal with the cloud infra for my personal site.

I could, I've done it in corporate, I've done it for my startup 2 years ago. But I'm rusty, I don't know what the latest people are using for configuration, etc.

Because there is 1 click with CF or Vercel and I don't have to think about it—I don't. If they increase their price it likely wouldn't be enough friction for me dust off the rust.

I think this is the relation. I'm not locked in, it's just HTML pages, but I am through my own habit energy, tech changing, and what I want to put effort into, which is not infra and serving my site.

Re:Cloudflare acquires Astro by mynameisvlad on Friday January 16, 2026 @12:42PM (#46649273)
What lock in? They explicitly said:

> Staying open to all was a non-negotiable requirement for both us and for Cloudflare.

They have deployment guides for practically every provider out there: https://docs.astro.build/en/guides/deploy/

And at the end of the day, most of the deployment is just deploying a static site... Which you can do practically anywhere.

Re:Cloudflare acquires Astro by thayne on Friday January 16, 2026 @01:45PM (#46650278)
They can stay open source, but stop putting any effort into supporting deploying to cloudflare's competitors, including accepting PRs for such improvements.

Or they could add features that only work if you deploy via cloudflare.

I also take anything said in an acquisition announcement with a grain of salt. It is pretty common for companies to make changes they said they wouldn't a few years after an acquisition.

Re:Cloudflare acquires Astro by mynameisvlad on Friday January 16, 2026 @02:08PM (#46650681)
Once again, it’s a static site builder. How, exactly, would they “stop supporting deploying to cloudflare’s competitors”? Be specific.
Re:Cloudflare acquires Astro by HumanOstrich on Friday January 16, 2026 @02:39PM (#46651101)
The same ways Vercel makes it harder to deploy Next.js sites to competitors or for self hosting.
Re:Cloudflare acquires Astro by fady0 on Friday January 16, 2026 @03:33PM (#46651835)
Next.js isn't just a static site generator.
Re:Cloudflare acquires Astro by HumanOstrich on Friday January 16, 2026 @03:56PM (#46652098)
Neither is Astro. Not sure what your point is.
Re:Cloudflare acquires Astro by mynameisvlad on Friday January 16, 2026 @05:33PM (#46653114)
Yes it is. All of the providers support “Static”, which literally means uploading /dist to your provider of choice.

They also have three pages worth of deployment adapters for one line deployment on many platforms, including many built by the community. https://astro.build/integrations/?search=&categories%5B%5D=a...

Did you even bother to look at their site or even better the guides I posted upthread or just decide to pull that out of your ass?

Re:Cloudflare acquires Astro by HumanOstrich on Friday January 16, 2026 @05:40PM (#46653192)
Did YOU even bother to look at their site? They support more than static generation, including SSR and even API endpoints. That means Astro has a server that can run server-side (or serverless) to do more than static site generation, so it's not just a static site generator either.

And yes I can see you're posting the same lie all over the comments here.

Stop being a potty mouth.

Re:Cloudflare acquires Astro by theturtletalks on Friday January 16, 2026 @04:36PM (#46652550)
Vercel does not make Next.js hard to deploy elsewhere. Next.js runs fine on serverful platforms like Railway, Render, and Heroku. I have run a production Next.js SaaS on Railway for years with no issues.

What Vercel really did was make Next.js work well in serverless environments, which involves a lot of custom infrastructure [0]. Cloudflare wanted that same behavior on CF Workers, but Vercel never open-sourced how they do it, and that is not really their responsibility.

Next.js is not locked to Vercel. The friction shows up when trying to run it in a serverless model without building the same kind of platform Vercel has.

0. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sIVL4JMqRfc

Re:Cloudflare acquires Astro by NicoJuicy on Saturday January 17, 2026 @04:59AM (#46656773)
So it is vendor locked by Vercel. That's why there is OpenNext - https://opennext.js.org/
Re:Cloudflare acquires Astro by philipallstar on Saturday January 17, 2026 @02:04PM (#46660920)
How is it vendor locked?
Re:Cloudflare acquires Astro by NicoJuicy on Saturday January 17, 2026 @07:15PM (#46663536)
Recent features are more dependent on Vercel and it's OpenNext that makes it platform independent with adapters.
Re:Cloudflare acquires Astro by Capricorn2481 on Saturday January 17, 2026 @03:44AM (#46656347)
Can you describe what you mean here? Because I have heard this about 100 times and never understood what people mean when they say this. I am hosting a NextJS site without Vercel and I had no special consideration for it.
Re:Cloudflare acquires Astro by mplewis on Friday January 16, 2026 @01:03PM (#46649593)
Yeah. For now.
Re:Cloudflare acquires Astro by bahmboo on Friday January 16, 2026 @01:12PM (#46649746)
That's always been true. Perhaps even more so as Astro constantly faced an existential battle for a working business. Now they don't have to do that and Cloudflare makes their money on their infra business. Locking Astro up now or in the future gains them very little compared to how much they make with hosted upsell services. [edit: clarity]
Re:Cloudflare acquires Astro by mynameisvlad on Friday January 16, 2026 @01:14PM (#46649769)
It's a static site builder. It creates a static site. HTML, CSS, and JS. That you can then upload literally anywhere.

Once again, what lock in? There is literally nothing to lock in. Explain exactly how they are going to lock somebody in, moreso than the lazy "for now" which you seem to constantly repeat.

Re:Cloudflare acquires Astro by mmooss on Friday January 16, 2026 @08:45PM (#46654502)
They can say whatever they want, and then do whatever they want. They have no contractual or legal obligation.

Almost every (it seems) acquisition begins with saying, 'nothing will change and the former management will stay on'. A year later, the former managment leaves and things change dramatically.

Re:Cloudflare acquires Astro by sofixa on Friday January 16, 2026 @12:45PM (#46649317)
No? It's still the same Astro that you can move to any other provider that supports it - and it's just Javascript, so pretty much everyone supports it.
Re:Cloudflare acquires Astro by mplewis on Friday January 16, 2026 @01:03PM (#46649595)
For now.
Re:Cloudflare acquires Astro by jtbaker on Friday January 16, 2026 @10:17AM (#46647220)
> Nextjs has no support

From what I remember, you can't even run a NextJS app through vite?

Re:Cloudflare acquires Astro by mattgreenrocks on Friday January 16, 2026 @12:20PM (#46648969)
This is insane to me, and validates my irrational dislike of next.
Re:Cloudflare acquires Astro by hungryhobbit on Friday January 16, 2026 @12:31PM (#46649122)
Definitely irrational. There are lots of logical reasons to dislike Next (like the fact that they pile new shiny bit on top of new shiny bit without caring about the regular user experience) ... but being mad that it can't run on Vite is silly.

It's like being mad that Rails can't run on Python, or that React can't run on jQuery. Next already has its own build system, so of course it doesn't work with another build system.

Re:Cloudflare acquires Astro by mattgreenrocks on Friday January 16, 2026 @01:02PM (#46649575)
Isn’t the next.js build system known for being slow/memory hungry?
Re:Cloudflare acquires Astro by pjmlp on Friday January 16, 2026 @04:23PM (#46652392)
For those stuck in the past yes, they have replaced it with a Rust based toolchain, as is so fashionable nowadays.
Re:Cloudflare acquires Astro by mzronek on Friday January 16, 2026 @04:44PM (#46652635)
Luckily DX is much better now with Turbopack as a bundler. First they improved the dev server, now with Turbo builds the production builds are faster as well. Still not fully stable in my opinion, but they will get there.

It's also wise to use monorepo orchestration with build caching like Turborepo.

They did well on the turbo stuff, no doubt about it.

The main bottleneck with big projects in my experience is Typescript. Looking forward to the Go rewrite. :)

Re:Cloudflare acquires Astro by jtbaker on Friday January 16, 2026 @12:26PM (#46649057)
100% rational. Nuxt/Astro FTW.
Re:Cloudflare acquires Astro by mpeg on Friday January 16, 2026 @10:27AM (#46647350)
Yes, that's part of the problem, deploying nextjs to cloudflare in the first place used to be an absolute nightmare, let alone the dev experience (I think it's better now)
Re:Cloudflare acquires Astro by sp4cec0wb0y on Friday January 16, 2026 @11:42AM (#46648452)
Wasn't this a decision made by Vercel to incentivize people using Vercel for NextJS apps? I can't recall.
Re:Cloudflare acquires Astro by jamieatlason on Friday January 16, 2026 @12:34PM (#46649169)
It's gotten a lot better since last year with OpenNext. Last I tested was Next.js 15 though. Who knows what Vercel has broken with Next.js 16.

https://opennext.js.org/cloudflare

Re:Cloudflare acquires Astro by Vinnl on Friday January 16, 2026 @02:08PM (#46650684)
That doesn't sound too preposterous; I wouldn't assume you'd be able to run a React Router project on Turbopack or Webpack either, and Next.js I think has a way more intricate dependence on the bundler to power a significant chunk of its features.
Re:Cloudflare acquires Astro by Y_Y on Friday January 16, 2026 @11:56AM (#46648636)
This reads like marketing copy. Maybe it reflects your actual feelings but it's hard to imagine that if you don't write like a human.
Re:Cloudflare acquires Astro by satvikpendem on Friday January 16, 2026 @12:00PM (#46648711)
It does not read like marketing copy to me, what part of talking about draft PRs and framrworks sounds like marketing speak? They're right that CloudFlare having priority access to new Astro features is beneficial for them.
Re:Cloudflare acquires Astro by ghurtado on Friday January 16, 2026 @12:33PM (#46649154)
What a bizarre comment. What part of it was "not human" in your opinion?
Re:Cloudflare acquires Astro by mpeg on Friday January 16, 2026 @01:48PM (#46650339)
Not sure how to feel about this! I’ve been known to use em dashes every now and then, but I am indeed a fellow human.

I’m close to the vite plugin in particular and have contributed to multiple frameworks around cf integration (simply because I use cf), that’s why I chose it as an example (and it’s one of Astro 6’s biggest features)

Re:Cloudflare acquires Astro by Seattle3503 on Friday January 16, 2026 @12:52PM (#46649424)
So when folks say they want to see big companies invest in open source, this is what that looks like. CF could have kept coasting on what Astro was building, but instead they are paying for it. But in return they get a lot of control.
Re:Cloudflare acquires Astro by skybrian on Friday January 16, 2026 @01:24PM (#46649925)
Well, hopefully more like Go's relationship with Google? The company that pays the bills is their first and most important customer, but as far as I can tell from the outside, the Go team makes its own plans and management doesn't pull rank.
Re:Cloudflare acquires Astro by Seattle3503 on Friday January 16, 2026 @02:23PM (#46650879)
Definitely!
Re:Cloudflare acquires Astro by knowitnone3 on Friday January 16, 2026 @04:30PM (#46652481)
You know this because you work on the Go team or part of google management?
Re:Cloudflare acquires Astro by skybrian on Saturday January 17, 2026 @11:28AM (#46659322)
> as far as I can tell from the outside

Anyone with actual knowledge, feel free to chime in.

Re:Cloudflare acquires Astro by ignoramous on Friday January 16, 2026 @03:04PM (#46651458)
> CF could have kept coasting on what Astro was building, but instead they are paying for it. But in return they get a lot of control.

Supabase pioneered the modern implementation of this model. Probably, RedHat before it? Google also tend to "acquihire" maintainers of popular FOSS projects, like Ben Goodger (Firefox), Scott Remnant (Upstart), Junio Hamano (Git), Guido von Rossum (Python).

Re:Cloudflare acquires Astro by nindalf on Friday January 16, 2026 @11:38AM (#46648396)
None of us have access to Cloudflare's internal data. But a reasonable guess is that enough of their current and future paying customers use Astro? I'm one of those - Astro hosted on Cloudflare.
Re:Cloudflare acquires Astro by paxys on Friday January 16, 2026 @10:16AM (#46647211)
They get to make Astro -> Cloudflare the default publishing pipeline. Sure users may pick something else, but even if a small % stick with Cloudflare that's an overall win.
Re:Cloudflare acquires Astro by threetonesun on Friday January 16, 2026 @10:52AM (#46647739)
I expected something clearer in the blog post about deploying Astro on Cloudflare Pages, as I imagine many Astro users (like me) are on Netlify.

I think every deployment pipeline having it's own preferred UI framework (and CMS, and cloud-DB solution) makes a lot of sense.

Re:Cloudflare acquires Astro by HumanOstrich on Friday January 16, 2026 @02:42PM (#46651146)
Why did you expect info about deploying Astro to Cloudflare Pages? It's been supported for a long time already.
Re:Cloudflare acquires Astro by threetonesun on Friday January 16, 2026 @04:05PM (#46652192)
Seems like an obvious thing to call out for people (like me) who don't know.
Re:Cloudflare acquires Astro by HumanOstrich on Friday January 16, 2026 @04:10PM (#46652258)
So something like "now that we own Astro, all of you using Netlify should start migrating to Cloudflare Pages"?
Re:Cloudflare acquires Astro by threetonesun on Friday January 16, 2026 @04:29PM (#46652470)
"Hey don't forget it's easy to deploy Astro on Cloudflare pages" with a link to the docs? I saw them mention deployments to Cloudflare (and continuing to support other platforms) but had to go look up what Cloudflare's platform is even called myself. Seems like a missed marketing opportunity.
Re:Cloudflare acquires Astro by pxtail on Friday January 16, 2026 @09:56AM (#46646964)
It's obvious when you look at https://astro.build/blog/astro-6-beta/ and see "Cloudflare" sprinkled everywhere in the article.
Re:Cloudflare acquires Astro by kelvinjps10 on Friday January 16, 2026 @12:04PM (#46648757)
Advertise their solution? Now astro can put them into the main deploying option and that's a good way for cloudfare to acquire new customers
Re:Cloudflare acquires Astro by bflesch on Friday January 16, 2026 @10:46AM (#46647636)
Cloudflare definitely gets positive PR out of this which makes people forget their CEO's recent meltdown on twitter.
Re:Cloudflare acquires Astro by chuckadams on Friday January 16, 2026 @11:43AM (#46648462)
The "meltdown" where he refused to jump to the whims of Italy's football cartel and block whatever addresses they wanted without accountability or review? More meltdowns, please.
Re:Cloudflare acquires Astro by epolanski on Friday January 16, 2026 @12:02PM (#46648737)
A meltdown is a meltdown.

Cloudflare is bound to respect the laws of the countries it operates, and if he disagrees with the process, understandable, that was not the way to express it.

Re:Cloudflare acquires Astro by philipallstar on Saturday January 17, 2026 @02:12PM (#46661021)
You get what you pay for with free PR commentary.
Re:Cloudflare acquires Astro by Aissen on Friday January 16, 2026 @09:59AM (#46646995)
What does Vercel get out of Next.js? Just default integration of overpriced cloud infra.
Re:Cloudflare acquires Astro by azangru on Friday January 16, 2026 @10:06AM (#46647088)
Vercel was founded (or co-founded?) by the author of Next.js. That's a very different story. Vercel is like what some hypothetical Astro Cloud could have become if it had grown out of Astro.
Re:Cloudflare acquires Astro by amitav1 on Friday January 16, 2026 @11:46AM (#46648491)
"I don't care, it's a stupid question."
Re:Cloudflare acquires Astro by pjmlp on Friday January 16, 2026 @10:11AM (#46647140)
It gets to be THE platform where to deploy frontends for many headless enterprise CMS and comerce stores that due to partnerships with Vercel only have Next.js based SDKs.

Additionally, I wish more serveless cloud vendors would offer a free tier like Vercel, including support for compiled languages on the backend (C, C++, Rust, Go) without asking me for a credit card upfront.

Re:Cloudflare acquires Astro by lateral_cloud on Friday January 16, 2026 @09:55AM (#46646945)
Mindshare with developers is what cloudflare gets
Re:Cloudflare acquires Astro by richardwhiuk on Friday January 16, 2026 @10:11AM (#46647127)
https://www.tumblr.com/ourincrediblejourney

This is probably just an acquihire.

Re:Cloudflare acquires Astro by adverbly on Friday January 16, 2026 @11:26AM (#46648237)
I for one host several Astro sites on Cloudflare Pages.

Its quite a nice DX actually.

I could see Cloudflare just wanting to push for a bit more vertical integration in the space to give themselves some more options.

Re:Cloudflare acquires Astro by pier25 on Friday January 16, 2026 @10:12AM (#46647149)
Probably better support for CF Workers/Pages and better integration with Wrangler.
Re:Cloudflare acquires Astro by whimsicalism on Friday January 16, 2026 @11:42AM (#46648453)
cloudflare wants to be vercel
Re:Cloudflare acquires Astro by unfunco on Friday January 16, 2026 @12:00PM (#46648708)
Cloudflare wants to be worth much less?
Re:Cloudflare acquires Astro by philipwhiuk on Friday January 16, 2026 @09:57AM (#46646973)
Feels like they are trying to do vertical integration on the whole stack and compete with Vercel.
Re:Cloudflare acquires Astro by pjmlp on Friday January 16, 2026 @10:13AM (#46647157)
For me, anyone that tries to compete with Vercel has to beat their offering in backend runtimes.
Re:Cloudflare acquires Astro by csomar on Friday January 16, 2026 @10:38AM (#46647515)
Nextjs doesn’t really work on cloudflare with the latest versions. There is an adapter but it’s buggy as hell. The direction is also likely to continue: https://omarabid.com/nextjs-vercel

Source: I use cloudflare and used to run my app there (nextjs) and had to do a migration to vite.js. So the way I see it, this is cloudflare response to vercel.

Re:Cloudflare acquires Astro by solarkraft on Friday January 16, 2026 @12:34PM (#46649161)
My god. Every time I touch Next.js in some project I think “hey, this actually doesn’t feel so bad to develop with, dare I say it feels nice?“ and every time I read about it I think “what the hell, this is the worst choice you can make“.

It’s wild that they’re somewhat taking the whole React ecosystem with them.

Re:Cloudflare acquires Astro by everybodyknows on Friday January 16, 2026 @02:32PM (#46651009)
Following your link, the fault for this appears to lie entirely with Vercel management.

Cross fingers that CloudFlare never try similar lock-in games, now that they control Astro?

Re:Cloudflare acquires Astro by csomar on Friday January 16, 2026 @08:16PM (#46654351)
I don’t think so since they are using the worker model. My guess is that the first class support will go to that. Though they can do lockin differently (kv, queues, etc..)
Re:Cloudflare acquires Astro by zipy124 on Friday January 16, 2026 @12:32PM (#46649139)
Sometimes it is cheaper to buy a company than build the internal tool team you might have had to build from scratch anyway. Half acqui-hire, half knowing you've built something on-top of it and want it to stick around.

I also wouldn't be surprised if cloudflare wants to build this into their site-hosting capabilities.

Re:Cloudflare acquires Astro by jayanmn on Friday January 16, 2026 @09:39PM (#46654776)
VMware maintained spring framework for many years. It was good ( as a user)