alt Hacker NewsIt 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.
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It's obvious when you look at https://astro.build/blog/astro-6-beta/ and see "Cloudflare" sprinkled everywhere in the article.
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.
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.
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.
Cloudflare definitely gets positive PR out of this which makes people forget their CEO's recent meltdown on twitter.
What does Vercel get out of Next.js? Just default integration of overpriced cloud infra.
Mindshare with developers is what cloudflare gets
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
Probably better support for CF Workers/Pages and better integration with Wrangler.
https://www.tumblr.com/ourincrediblejourney
This is probably just an acquihire.
Feels like they are trying to do vertical integration on the whole stack and compete with Vercel.
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.
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.
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)