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Show HN: Heroku/Fly.io-like app deployments to Cloudflare Containers

https://github.com/michaloo/flarepilot

The Cloudflare ecosystem is great. I love deploying apps to Workers, but not all applications can be ported to serverless architecture.

Cloudflare Containers have been around for a while (still in beta though) to address that. They are using Firecracker VMs under the hood (https://firecracker-microvm.github.io/) and allow you to deploy any Docker image across their infrastructure.

But for somebody who just wants to take their Docker image and deploy, going through the whole Wrangler setup, writing a Worker script, dealing with Durable Objects may be discouraging for quick experimentation.

I built a simple Node.js CLI that implements Heroku/Fly.io developer experience on top of Cloudflare Containers.

1. Open directory with Dockerfile 2. Auth with Cloudflare API token 3. Deploy

- it will create a routing/loadbalancing worker - add Durable Objects and Container bindings - and return live app url within couple of minutes

You can then play with scaling it across regions and instances:

``` flarepilot scale myapp -r eeur,weur -i 1 flarepilot scale myapp -r eeur -i 4 ```

It is a very basic proof-of-concept using locationHints, not ready for production.

Just experimenting for fun.

( 2 comments | 2 points | on HN )
Re:Show HN: Heroku/Fly.io-like app deployments to Cloudflare... by maxxmini on Thursday February 19, 2026 @05:37AM (#47072327)
Nice work! The Cloudflare Containers DX gap is real - setting up Wrangler + Durable Objects + Container bindings just to run a Docker image is way too much ceremony. Having a simple `deploy` command that handles all that plumbing is exactly what the ecosystem needs.

Question: how does cold start compare to Fly.io? Since these are Firecracker VMs under the hood, I'd expect similar performance, but curious if the Cloudflare routing layer adds overhead.

Re:Show HN: Heroku/Fly.io-like app deployments to Cloudflare... by michaloo on Thursday February 19, 2026 @06:45AM (#47072800)
Thanks! Based on my impressions CF Containers are slower to boot but have lower latency later. I moved some test apps from DigitalOcean App and I saw 10-20% improvements in loading time (which is different what you asked since DigitalOcean is probably more k8s than firecracker, but just to share my experience).