11 ms·

Cloudflare acquires Astro

960 points by todotask2 9mo ago

https://www.cloudflare.com/pl-pl/press/press-releases/2026/cloudflare-acquires-astro-to-accelerate-the-future-of-high-performance-web-development/ https://www.cloudflare.com/pl-pl/press/press-releases/2026/c...

pier25 9mo ago
Astro is amazing. I've been using it for a couple of years now. Initially only for static sites but now I'm building the UI of all my web projects with it. I wonder if there will be some sort of collab between Hono and Astro given that Yusukue also works at Cloudflare.
- upcoming-sesame 9mo ago
  Yup, there's a lot of overlap especially with the HonoX framework that has island architecture as well!
- TurdF3rguson 9mo ago
  This is the main thing for me. If I can keep the cf workers backend in the same repo and deploy them together I will consider leaving Next.js for good.
mpeg 9mo ago
This is cool, I use astro when I just want to spin up a quick site without having to fight the framework (looking at you, Nextjs) and the main thing I disliked was the initiatives around paid extras they had going Astro and Tanstack are probably the best full-stack routers these days, and Astro wins in terms of the wide support for almost any client-side tech
phartenfeller 9mo ago
Why does Cloudflare need a web framework? Most obvious would be they think they can make money from hosting astro sites (like Vercel and NextJS). I hope Cloudflare's impact on Astro will be tiny. But another great thing being swallowed by big tech...
- arcanemachiner 9mo ago
  > But another great thing being swallowed by big tech... I will never use Cloudflare if I can help it, but this outcome is preferable to Astro becoming abandonware.
  - phartenfeller 9mo ago
    There are so many more options than being acquired and abandonware. Its hard but there are many independent and stable open source projects.
- arcfour 9mo ago
  This is overly cynical without reason. CloudFlare is hardly "big tech" even if it is a "big" "tech" company. They have no record of killing or abusing open source projects.
  - blibble 9mo ago
    > CloudFlare is hardly "big tech" yeah, it's still losing money
    - aiiizzz 9mo ago
      [flagged]
      - blibble 9mo ago
        > according to Gemini thanks for the unrequested slop! you know what GAAP stands for? "generally accepted accounting practices" so what does non-gaap mean? "non-generally accepted accounting practices" aka: bullshit
      - efilife 9mo ago
        why are you doing this?
        9mo ago
tnolet 9mo ago
Refreshing to see an acquisition (acquihire?) that just plainly says they were not able to monetize.
philipallstar 9mo ago
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.
- pxtail 9mo ago
  It's obvious when you look at https://astro.build/blog/astro-6-beta/ https://astro.build/blog/astro-6-beta/ and see "Cloudflare" sprinkled everywhere in the article.
- lateral_cloud 9mo ago
  Mindshare with developers is what cloudflare gets
- philipwhiuk 9mo ago
  Feels like they are trying to do vertical integration on the whole stack and compete with Vercel.
  - pjmlp 9mo ago
    For me, anyone that tries to compete with Vercel has to beat their offering in backend runtimes.
- mpeg 9mo ago
  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)
weli 9mo ago
Nice. I love astro and I love cloudflare. Most of my static pages are that stack.
koakuma-chan 9mo ago
I am very disappointed with Astro. Who is this framework for? It's been years, and they still don't support unit testing Astro Actions. They still don't support inter-island communication. "Astro v6 is around the corner" - and the only changes are 1. refactored CLI (why? it's perfectly fine) 2. bumped zod to v4 It's great if you want to build a blog or something, but it's definitely far from great for building apps. Don't know what they are thinking.
- philipwhiuk 9mo ago
  If all you are writing a blog and you're not using Substack or Squarespace or any of the other million blog hosting options you're crazy IMO.
  - pier25 9mo ago
    Substack only really makes sense if you want to monetize your content.
  - re5i5tor 9mo ago
    If you aren’t realizing the importance of POSSE imho that’s crazy ;-)
  - upcoming-sesame 9mo ago
    Why ? Spinning up a blog these days with one of these frameworks is almost quicker than signing up to one of the blog hosting platforms. And you get to keep your data in markdown easily portable
  - array_key_first 9mo ago
    You become beholden to these platforms and they're inherently not portable. There is risk here, and given the track record of Internet companies I think it's fair to say the risk is not worth it for many people. Your costs could explode, or worse, the business could go under and you lose all your shit.
- drawfloat 9mo ago
  I don't think it's really targeted at building apps, as far as I can tell its whole pitch has always been that that most websites are not apps and therefore most websites do not need a full JS framework like Next.js. They even say it in this blog: "Our mission to design a web framework specifically for building websites — what we call content-driven websites, to better distinguish from data-driven, stateful web applications — resonated"
embedding-shape 9mo ago
> In 2021, Astro was born out of frustration. The trend at the time was that every website should be architected as an application, and then shipped to the user’s browser to render. Was it? Hot damn, I knew it'll eventually happen, but we truly are just running around in circles. Eventually these same people will do the same loop around, creating new frameworks because the current "server<>client" model suddenly doesn't make any sense anymore, and of course this should be rendered server-side. Why are we doomed to repeat this, and why does it happen so quickly particularly in web development? We have each other's histories and knowledge right in front of us, what's missing for us to not continue just running around in circles like this?
- boxed 9mo ago
  [flagged]
- philipwhiuk 9mo ago
  Yeah, I'm not sure I understand why "islands" isn't just "bits of JavaScript on a static page". It feels like the "JavaScript as a Server Side Language" folk are just repeatedly re-inventing stuff that has been done a million times by other systems with a different back-end only with a new fancy name.
  - verdverm 9mo ago
    The have Rust now so the entire tooling layer can justifiably be rewritten a few more times
  - mpeg 9mo ago
    The key difference between islands and what we used to do back in the day (js on a static page) is that with an islands approach you architect your site with a components-driven approach where everything encapsulates the js/css/html it needs, then you mark it as an "interactive" island if you actually need client-side js to run – the code is the same, but it either runs only in the server (default) or in both server and client. I know this sounds similar, but, compared to the more traditional approach, there is a certain simplicity to having everything just be javascript. You can often run the same libraries on both server and client depending on your needs, plus it fulfills the promise of web components in a way that is easier to work with (though WCs have also come a long way!)
saltytostitos 9mo ago
Cloudflare: Astro Vercel: NuxtLabs, Next. All open source. What a strange competition.
jcmfernandes 9mo ago
Damn. What alternatives does HN recommend?
- arcanemachiner 9mo ago
  Well, there's this other project that recently secured funding from a company that has a proven track record of supporting great open-source projects like Astro, TanStack, and Hono without trying to capture or lock anything down. There's even an article about it somewhere.
- azangru 9mo ago
  Eleventy, of course :-) But why are you looking for alternatives already?
  - jcmfernandes 9mo ago
    I'm not! Just preparing myself for the worst-case scenario and creating some bookmarks meanwhile.
  - throwawa71973 9mo ago
    Dropped eleventy recently. Disliked the templating solutions, the messy documentation, the loss in momentum, and liked a lot of the stuff (especially the tooling and principles) in astro. Also strongly disliked how political eleventy got. I just wanted a website, not a an internal debate about what I am potentially being absorbed into. I can vote, and spend money on donations, I don't need to enact change through my tech stack.
    - wahnfrieden 9mo ago
      What are you referring to re: it getting political?
- evantbyrne 9mo ago
  I experimented a lot with bootstrapping React projects this past fall, and Astro was by far the least painful to use. Notably, it was the least goofy of all of the React starter kits to use for server API development.
quentindanjou 9mo ago
After Netlify acquired GatsbyJS, I am not very hopeful about the future of Astro. I hope to be wrong because Astro is a great framework.
- azangru 9mo ago
  It still baffles me why Netlify did that. Gatsby seemed to have already been dying, even before the acquisition; and it didn't look like Netlify was planning to invest in it.
  - ascorbic 9mo ago
    Netlify didn't buy Gatsby for the framework. They wanted the hosting business and the GraphQL thing. They said this at the time, and it's true. It was barely resourced. Cloudflare is only interested in the framework (because Astro has nothing else). Source/disclosure: I worked at Gatsby, Netlify, Astro and Cloudflare
    - azangru 9mo ago
      Why did they want Gatsby's graphQL thing? What was attractive about it?
      - ascorbic 9mo ago
        Seemed a good idea at the time. The unified data layer was always the best thing about Gatsby (which is why I nicked the idea for the Astro content layer), but maybe not as a hosted product
shibel 9mo ago
Astro is great. It checks all of my checkboxes. I hope this is not the beginning of the end.
tin7in 9mo ago
Astro is great and I hope they keep improving after the acquisition. Given what agents can do, I feel a lot of the sites built on Webflow, Framer and so on will move to code and Astro is a great framework for this.
__jonas 9mo ago
I like the idea behind Astro, I've used it for a couple websites here and there. I'm a bit worried about the complexity brought by Astro supporting all these different frameworks through its adapters, and how stable and maintainable those websites will be in the future. For instance: I've been using Astro with Svelte to build static sites with some components that require client-side interactivity. I really like that Astro doesn't ship any JS by default and just outputs static HTML, and when I want some page to have an interactive JS component, Svelte is an option that produces a relatively small amount of client JS. But: Using Svelte with Astro this way for static sites has been broken since August 2025. As soon as you have a conditionally rendered child component in Svelte, Astro fails to bundle the styles for it in the static output of the site, and it does that ONLY in production, which is really devious, you could build a whole site (using astro dev) without knowing and then it breaks when you deploy it. The issue is here: https://github.com/withastro/astro/issues/14252 https://github.com/withastro/astro/issues/14252 I don't want to be complaining about how quickly issues get addressed in an OSS project that I'm not paying for, I don't blame them for not keeping tabs on every framework integration, I just would love to build websites with the latest versions Astro and Svelte, and I unfortunately have the feeling I should have just gone with SvelteKit for a smoother experience.
- giancarlostoro 9mo ago
  I havent had a chance to fully use it in a project yet, but it is one of my favorite projects only tinker with it, I'm glad it will receive funding to keep it going. It is definitely a solid gem of open source since its not married to one single SPA framework.
  - __jonas 9mo ago
    Yeah I suppose it's a tradeoff. I have had an excellent experience when not hydrating components at all, and I like their approach significantly more than other SSGs overall. My worry is just the massive scope of supporting integrations with all those frameworks AND its own .astro language / syntax AND server side rendering in addition to static generation.
maxencecornet 9mo ago
Very unexpected but it's a great match. I have been using Astro with Cloudflare Pages and the dev UX is fantastic
re5i5tor 9mo ago
I use Astro deployed on Cloudflare, blog-newsletter kind of site [1], moved over from Hugo. If this keeps Astro viable then it seems like a net win. [1] https://cto4.ai https://cto4.ai
- re5i5tor 9mo ago
  Based on a request presumably from a HN viewer, I made the repo [2] for this site public. [2] https://github.com/cto4ai/cto4ai-blog https://github.com/cto4ai/cto4ai-blog
MarkusAllen 9mo ago
[flagged]
- mp05 9mo ago
  Holy survivorship bias Batman, and yeah, nice punchy AI sentences you got there.
- pjmlp 9mo ago
  > Linux: 33 years old, runs the internet, community-funded Only in dreams, it took off thanks to the likes of IBM that decided it was a way to save costs on their UNIX development efforts, many key projects have been founded thanks to Red-Hat Enterprise licenses, nowadays also part of IBM. GCC, clang, GNOME, Linux kernel, systemd, CUPS, AMD/NVidia drivers, have plenty of big corp money. From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Linux https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Linux "1998: Many major companies such as IBM, Compaq and Oracle announce their support for Linux."
  - haolez 9mo ago
    Big corp money is not VC money. That's the point.
    - pjmlp 9mo ago
      Depends on which corporation.
      - halestock 9mo ago
        No, it depends on whether they have an ownership stake in what they’re funding or not.
        pjmlp 9mo ago
        All a matter of if the project dies when the money fountain runs dry, and developers have to find another way to pay bills other than a few meagre donations.
ramon156 9mo ago
Perfect direction! Astro has been incredible for small static pages. CF workers are also really easy to impl
angelfangs 9mo ago
Tried Astro after being utterly confused with Hugo templating and found it rather over-engineered. Went with 11tty instead and don't regret it.
suyash 9mo ago
Another open source framework likely be dead soon, what are the alternatives ?
wahnfrieden 9mo ago
This sucks
fnoef 9mo ago
Welp, I'm worried. I like Astro, but maybe it's time to make my own SSG, to not ever end up in the hand of a few big-sharks that consolidate and enshittify everything.
- sieep 9mo ago
  jumped on the same train, still using astro in production but on the side im using Elixir to create an SSG to use moving forward for anything new.
- adzm 9mo ago
  Fork it and call it Cosmo
lifetimerubyist 9mo ago
So this is what happens to open source now? It runs out of money and one of the big corpos gobbles it up. Lovely. I think donating to the Apache Foundation is preferable.
yawnxyz 9mo ago
Surprised this isn't in the article, but Cloudflare has been moving all their docs to Astro's Starlight docs framework. I'm guessing this is a way to prioritize features for Cloudflare: > https://blog.cloudflare.com/open-source-all-the-way-down-upgrading-our-developer-documentation/ https://blog.cloudflare.com/open-source-all-the-way-down-upg...
- fr3dx 9mo ago
  It is mentioned in the cloudflare blog post [1] "At Cloudflare, we use Astro, too — for our developer docs, website, landing pages, and more" [1] https://blog.cloudflare.com/astro-joins-cloudflare/ https://blog.cloudflare.com/astro-joins-cloudflare/
- buu700 9mo ago
  Coincidentally, I just migrated some support docs to Starlight a few hours before this acquisition announcement. Really nice framework.
pcthrowaway 9mo ago
I'm incredibly relieved they didn't join Vercel (which everyone else seems to be doing these days).
stared 9mo ago
I love Astro - migrated my blog there (here it was a gradual improvement), migrated company website there (here a lot, to joy of everyone). In the times of vibe coding, there is much less reason to use WYSWIG website editors. In our company, a non-technical assistant, modified website with Claude Code. I hope that this acquisition will go well. It would be sad to lose this great framework. At the same time, we deploy on Cloudflare. So their business is to keep Astro cool so that more people will use Claudflare, it would be a win-win!
deleted 9mo ago
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dkhenry 9mo ago
Astro on Cloudflare workers has been my goto stack for multiple years now. I am very happy with it, and hope this makes the integration stronger. Now we just need Cloudflare to buy one of the DBaaS companies so they have a solid relational offering.
- upcoming-sesame 9mo ago
  What about Cloudflare D1?
  - dkhenry 9mo ago
    D1 is fine when it fits the use case, but most of the time I just want Postgres that I will use for absolutely everything. It has happened often enough that I have tried to make systems work with other storage systems, and eventually just give up and revert to Postgres. Every time I just start with Postgres I don't have issues until it turns out my laziness has caused a performance problem, and those I can fix.
  - Squarex 9mo ago
    It's quite slow.
- samtp 9mo ago
  Even just having a better DX/UI around D1 and their other current offerings would be a great start
  - jtbaker 9mo ago
    I'd love to see D1 as a supported catalog for https://ducklake.select/ https://ducklake.select/
- hdra 9mo ago
  I noticed the astro docs has lot of mention of Cloudflare worker as well, is there any reason why you didnt go with Cloudflare pages instead? I’d have guessed pages would be the perfect fit for hosting a rendered astro website
nindalf 9mo ago
I’ve used Astro on Cloudflare for a few years for my personal website (username.com). They’ve both been absolutely fantastic, I can’t say enough good things about both of them. My website has all 100s on PageSpeed/Lighthouse, and that’s because of the performance focus of both Astro and Cloudflare. No credit to me at all. It was mainly because Astro prioritised shipping 0 JS unless it was absolutely necessary and Cloudflare is exceedingly good at serving static HTML. But I also see the difficulty that Astro faced here. Despite being happy with the framework, I never paid for it. The paid offerings didn’t strike a chord with me. And it was partly because whatever they offered, Cloudflare already offered on a very generous free tier. I'm glad the team have got a second life within Cloudflare,. I'm happy for the people who've given me such excellent software for free for years. Thanks folks!
- kevinskii 9mo ago
  Likewise! I built my personal blog with Astro and host on Cloudflare (username.dev), and feel guilty about taking advantage of such excellent software and free tier. Here’s hoping they find a way to take my money soon.
- BenGosub 9mo ago
  amazing performance.
- deepfriedbits 9mo ago
  I appreciate your honest testimonial. It's so rare these days to read a sentence like, "No credit to me at all" haha
- ljm 9mo ago
  Out of curiosity, how do you become ‘exceedingly good’ at serving static HTML? By all accounts, they’ve centralised the delivery of this static HTML at several layers of the network stack, and you’re not getting static HTML anymore because some other part of the business fucked it up. The World Wide Web was serving static HTML for decades before Cloudflare came along. Open an FTP client, drag and drop, and boom - new HTMl is served.
827a 9mo ago
Astro is my favorite way to build websites (at least, of the kind its great at) and I'm happy for the team; Cloudflare is a super cool place to work. Excited to see in what directions this will develop. They have a real shot at being the next Next.
akmittal 9mo ago
I hope CLoudflare or another tech company buy deno. Deno is great, its lacking a big brand sponsorship.
- bobnamob 9mo ago
  Cloudflare are neck deep in v8 as their js runtime of choice. I doubt they'll be looking for another any time soon
deleted 9mo ago
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bryanhogan 9mo ago
My favorite framework, and what has brought me much deeper into the world of web development. It's what I have used for me personal page https://bryanhogan.com/ https://bryanhogan.com/ . I'm happy to see it get funding, although I hope this doesn't introduce entshittification. So far I'm hopeful though. It's the first framework I recommend to web dev beginners, after they have built something with plain HTML and CSS.
Alifatisk 9mo ago
Wow, these are the same people behind Pika/Skypack and Snowpack. I can remember the day when they announced the Astro project, and now it's joining Cloudflare, incredible progress.
- jtbaker 9mo ago
  I'm glad they were able to pivot into Astro when Vite won the hot dev server game a few years back.
nozzlegear 9mo ago
I'm a little wary of this. I'd been using Gatsby for my static websites for a long time, until it got eaten up by Netlify and then sunset; I switched over to Astro at that point, but now I'm getting a sense of déjà vu.
- piffey 9mo ago
  Just setup my personal blog again after a four years hiatus using Astro (loved the good docs). Kind of disappointed, but given how simple static site generators are, probably something Claude could crank out easily with parity of features I actually use then wouldn't be beholden to any project's creators.
- deleted 9mo ago
  [deleted]
- brunoarueira 9mo ago
  I had moved out from Gatsby to Astro on my blog/site (username.com), mostly because the enormous dependency hell full of security issues, I know it's just things to generate static files, but it was causing a lot of headaches to upgrade and remove the issues. With Astro, I receive a lot less issues and the maintenance is easier! From my perspective if Cloudflare keep it that way, it'll be a win.
  - nozzlegear 9mo ago
    > I had moved out from Gatsby to Astro on my blog/site (username.com), mostly because the enormous dependency hell full of security issues, I know it's just things to generate static files, but it was causing a lot of headaches to upgrade and remove the issues. That's exactly what made me move to Astro. I would've been happy sticking with Gatsby since it still technically does what it says on the tin, but there were so many security warnings and issues with upgrading dependencies that I gave up.
- jakubmazanec 9mo ago
  Gatsby was sunset because it was a bad framework build on bad decisions [1]. I tried to use it when it was new, and it was immediately obvious that "GraphQL for everything" leads to horrible DX. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39619110 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39619110
Imustaskforhelp 9mo ago
From a developer perspecive, I was going to go "Ahh shit here we go again" But to be really honest, thinking more about it. atleast from an "AI" bubble perspective, Cloudflare is pretty rock solid and isn't involved in the AI bubble deals whereas vercel has If you were to use cloudflare workers say the past few months, you would've noticed some serious UI/UX improvements and its projects highlighted astro template was one of the first things (I think second was sveltekit iirc) Anyways thinking about it now, I am sure that cloudflare must have been in talks with them for quite some time and they had the astro deployments on cloudflare workers so they must have seen its usage and other data we have no idea about to justify this purchase That being said, I had been part of astro community almost exactly the time they had partnered up with turso (It was my holidays so I wanted to build a website from scratch, I sadly lost it but it was really cool and it had BMO from adventure time's pixel art that I lost oof :<) So I was in their discord when they had just joined turso for astro DB and at that point, you couldn't host it locally (some tried with wasm) not sure what's the reality now though. But its interesting to see this because cloudflare offers a turso (serverless sqlite) alternative as Cloudflare D1, So we might see Astro shift to d1? Once again, I have not been part of community for almost around 1-2 years so I don't know the current state of Astro aside from tweaking around making my own custom editor in bun for some astro templates (astro templates are really cool) Perhaps, we are gonna see astro templates website + cloudflare workers to create an instant deployment of astro templates on cloudflare workers as a first class citizen. Honestly I would love that because cf workers/pages are free/cheapest in the whole market. I hope that Astro still stays local first and still its serverless features can benefit everybody and not just cloudflare (looking at you vercel for nextjs)
- Otterlord 9mo ago
  Yep, Astro is and will always be platform-agnostic!
ndsipa_pomu 9mo ago
Did they just break Cloudflare?
jasona123 9mo ago
Only mildly surprising - Astro + CF Pages/Workers have been my go-to for when I want to spin up a static site or do anything else and it does feel like they've been really working on the integration between the two.
cdrnsf 9mo ago
I don’t want a framework that’s coupled to a hosting provider.
- pier25 9mo ago
  It's not and will probably never be. If you want some precedent look at Hono. Initially it was just for the CF Workers runtime (not developed by CF). Then CF started using Hono internally and hired the dev to work on Hono full time. Hono works on any JS runtime. https://hono.dev/docs/concepts/web-standard https://hono.dev/docs/concepts/web-standard
  - cdrnsf 9mo ago
    I suppose we’ll see — I’d be surprised if the whole promise of nothing will change don’t hold over the long term. I don’t love that Astro is tied to a narrow set of hosting providers either.
    - pier25 9mo ago
      Astro runs on many JS runtimes. It can be deployed anywhere.
hexbin010 9mo ago
I knew it was too good to last hah Congratulations!
Havoc 9mo ago
I hope they maintain a clear path to delay separately too. With these sort of combinations the deploy to cloudflare button gets ever bigger than over time. And then features get added that only work with CF and eventually it’s still open source but only half the stuff works standalone etc That said - good for them.
victorbjorklund 9mo ago
Oh no. This isn’t good. I’m glad that the team gets a payout but as an Astro user I don’t love it being owned by CF and that the goals of the project (at least indirectly) goes from the best way to deploy it to the best way to deploy it using CF.
- sp4cec0wb0y 9mo ago
  I don't anticipate it changing like that. You still do a build using Vite and deploy the static assets. How could they change that to make it difficult to host elsewhere?
  - victorbjorklund 9mo ago
    Let’s hope you’re right. I think vendor lock in is possible if they focus on features tightly coupled to Cloudflare. Look at Next.js. In theory you can deploy it anywhere, but in practice it is harder outside Vercel because of tight coupling around things like caching. You do not have to use those features, but if the framework is built to expect them, it pushes people into that platform. I can imagine Astro becoming very attractive to use with Cloudflare Workers and slowly locking people into that model.
    - dvtkrlbs 9mo ago
      It is not similar imho. First NextJS build system is not really exposed apart from a simple docker example and all advanced features of NextJS is kinda coupled to Vercel. For Astro it is just a Vite project with integration designed from day mind they would have to rip everything apart and that would probably cause a prominent fork. The other part is Cloudflare is not dependent Astro being vendor locked as much as Vercel being dependent on NextJS being vendor locked.
      - victorbjorklund 9mo ago
        Let’s hope you are being right. Note that I am not talking about Astro today but rather Astro in 5 years.
etchalon 9mo ago
Vercel buys frameworks. Cloudflare does the same. We all lose while they all tell us we're winning.
ramesh31 9mo ago
Vercel 2.0
arjie 9mo ago
Very nice to see these dev tools get an exit. e.g. I love `uv` and friends but did consider that perhaps dev tools are just a bad business and then no one will go into making that kind of stuff. Good exits means more of these tools. I have only used Astro for toy stuff but it seemed neat. Congrats to the team. EDIT: To put paid to the sidebar discussion below, yes I meant "for instance, consider `uv`; they might do these nice things and go nowhere but now that companies like Bun and Astro have gotten acquired, it demonstrates a future for others; therefore we will get more things like Astral's `uv` and so on". Hope that clarifies.
- woodruffw 9mo ago
  This is Astro, not Astral. uv is Astral :-) Edit: OP clarified what they meant, I'm sorry for the misunderstanding on my part!
  - satvikpendem 9mo ago
    They know, hence why they used e.g., i.e. exempli gratia
    - woodruffw 9mo ago
      I don't think that's really clear. I think we could both defer to the OP clarifying. For pedantry's sake: neither i.e. nor e.g. would be correct here. You want cf. ("conferatur") to invite a comparison; e.g. is when an example pertains to an instance. In this case uv would not pertain to the instance, because Astro is not Astral.
      - 0xFF0123 9mo ago
        cf. would invite a fair bit of confusion on an article about cloudflare
        woodruffw 9mo ago
        I agree! That's why I think it's probably just a confusion between entities. It doesn't make sense either as example or as a comparison (although IMO it makes more sense as the latter). (For the OP: I'm sorry if I misinterpreted you.)
stefanos82 9mo ago
I hope they've got rewarded astro...nomically well lol! My apologies friends, I could not resist! Congrats Astro team!
mattgreenrocks 9mo ago
Hope that SSR remains first class as time goes on. I think Astro’s DX is superb overall, and am bullish on server-rendered components in MPAs with a sprinkling of hypermedia libs for better UX. Some features of my SSR-based side project feel like I had to hack them on, such as a hook that runs only on app start (hacked in via middleware) or manually needing to set cache control headers for auth’d content. All in all, really happy with it. And it isn’t next.js.
bigblind 9mo ago
i'd personalloy love a quick video demo on the home screen, with someone walking through the experience of using the app; other than that, looks interesting;
kylecazar 9mo ago
Great for Astro.. About the download stats for open source frameworks and libraries.. I keep reading claims of "millions of weekly downloads" -- surely this is a noisy metric, right? NPM just counts GET requests. A significant number of those must be from CI/CD pipelines, mirrors, build servers, etc. It still signals popularity, but probably to a much lesser degree than implied.
- wiether 9mo ago
  How to measure the popularity of FOSS projects though? Number of downloads? Number of stars on GH? Number of content on social medias? The absolute value is meaningless in itself, but there's a big difference between a library that is downloaded a thousand or millions of times each week. That's the idea. Meanwhile for-profit projects have actual customers or revenues to demonstrate popularity.
  - 1718627440 9mo ago
    Availability in Debian, is the measure I personally use.
- shimman 9mo ago
  VC still use github stars as a viable metric, at some point you have to say aloud that they are basically engaging in shammanism and ritual sacrifices.
slfreference 9mo ago
This spam LLM account "MarkusAllen" (towards the very end) could be used by an adversory to discredit books / courses /"youtube channel" they link to. This is reverse psychology attack vector made possible by an LLM.
endorphine 9mo ago
> Now Astro is downloaded almost 1,000,000 times per week [...] Are these numbers supposed to provide any sense of the popularity if you're not often looking at npm trends?
endorphine 9mo ago
Is that a good deal for the employees of Astro? They're now Cloudflare employees, which I guess looks good on your CV. But do such acquihires usually result in higher salaries for regular (non-leadership) employees or? Also, what about NSOs?
yusufnb 9mo ago
I have always liked Astro. It also works great with AI tools since its combination of markdown and code. Was able to vibe code a quick blog template and deploy to cloudflare in minutes with an existing headless backend - https://sleekcms-astro-blog.pages.dev/ https://sleekcms-astro-blog.pages.dev/
- gulugawa 9mo ago
  This is making me even less interested in trying Astro. Websites should not be vibe coded.
  - Firehawke 9mo ago
    So.. just because a tool can be potentially mishandled (e.g. put in the hands of a toddler, which is basically what vibe code ends up being) because it's easy to use, you never want to take a look at said tool? That sounds like shooting yourself in the foot out of pure spite, but you do you.
    - gulugawa 9mo ago
      Astro is enabling vibe coders with a section of the documentation that gives advice on using AI, an Astro docs MCP server, and a copy of the documentation that is specifically formatted for LLM use.
  - yusufnb 9mo ago
    The code is vibe-coded. Not the content. Which I think is more important for a blog site.
naiv 9mo ago
Love Astro and it is exactly my stack with Cloudflare but wow, the "Forward-Looking Statements" disclaimer is longer than the press release itself
bilater 9mo ago
Astro to Cloudflare, Bun to Anthropic. Good trend seeing people toiling away at OS financially rewarded.
- itsafarqueue 9mo ago
  Two whole projects. A stampede.
  - bilater 9mo ago
    big beloved projects
- TiredOfLife 9mo ago
  Big difference is that Anthropic blocks competitors from using its products (they literally cut direct api access. Or even through 3rd party like Cursor).
sidcool 9mo ago
Cloudflare is getting into static site hosting game, like Vercel.
mb2100 9mo ago
Congrats to Fred and team! Developing and maintaining a complex framework takes lots of funding, and I’m glad Astro found a new home that provides that. With [Mastro], we have a different approach. The name originally stood for "minimal Astro", and we’re staying true to that. At just ~700 lines of TypeScript, Mastro will always be easily maintainable – even if by just a single person. And it's amazing how much you can do if you're very deliberate in your API's design. [Mastro]: https://mastrojs.github.io/ https://mastrojs.github.io/
pantulis 9mo ago
Adobe could have benefited from doing this acquisition but they can be somewhat forgiven as they are already pushing Edge Delivery Services which is based in NextJS although it's a different approach. Combined with the Universal Editor they have a solid headless authoring setup for enterprise CMS. But I really feel like Akamai is who dropped the ball here, this was a low hanging fruit for them and they're lacking offering this capability to offer their corporate clients as they transition to full headless. Now it's going to be their competition (Cloudflare, even Fastly through Adobe & the EDS push) who will try to take a portion of their cake.
bastawhiz 9mo ago
I've been using Astro for a couple years and it's delightful. I actually started using it for my docs because I saw Cloudflare was using it. I hope they are a good steward of the tech!
mmarian 9mo ago
Makes perfect sense. I use Astro with Cloudflare for all my frontend projects.
MaintenanceMode 9mo ago
I love astro, it's been such a pleasure to use and totally solved my need for a flexible platform. I managed to retire a bunch of Wordpress sites and I've never looked back. Hopefully I can still run it on netlify.
8cvor6j844qw_d6 9mo ago
What's the next best/popular alternative to Astro? Used this for a portfolio site and and not sure if this news is good or bad for its future.
- supernes 9mo ago
  I'm not jumping off Astro yet, but if I did I would probably go to Vike (https://vike.dev/ https://vike.dev/)
isodev 9mo ago
Oh wow, Cloudflare enschitification is practically in real time right now.
BenGosub 9mo ago
All wrongs in Gatsby have been gotten right in Astro. What will happen next remains to be seen, but currently Astro is amazing for a few specific cases it covers. The performance, developer experience and documentation are all great.
Strongbad536 9mo ago
ITT People arguing about how cloudflare is gonna unfairly favor their own platform and lock people in by making easier to deploy astro sites as if you can't already do it just by connecting a git repo to cloudflare pages with 1 click.
maximgeorge 9mo ago
[dead]
chrisweekly 9mo ago
Crossing fingers (but not holding breath) this doesn't lead to vendor lock-in or otherwise wreck Astro.
- kylehotchkiss 9mo ago
  Cloudflare doesn't need to vendor lock astro like vercel needed to vendor lock next. They have a massive amount of other things to sell.
  - chrisweekly 9mo ago
    I know. Still, not holding breath.
w10-1 9mo ago
I agree a good exit for devtools is good for devtools. I'd like to understand it better. The Astro claim is that astro developers will all continue full-time on it. So why acquire it instead of supporting it? The reason given in complementarity (content and infrastructure), but doesn't that mean that Cloudflare is moving into content? Perhaps it's fair to say some content fits better with Cloudflare, or making it easier to just have static sites is beneficial to Cloudflare? Is there a convention about announcements, for the acquired to announce happily first to bring customers, and then the acquirer to confirm their benign intentions? When can we expect Cloudflare's take?
- re-thc 9mo ago
  > The Astro claim is that astro developers will all continue full-time on it. So why acquire it instead of supporting it? In defense? Someone else can acquire it.
- sixo 9mo ago
  > So why acquire it instead of supporting it? Lots of reasons, but above all, control.
frivx 9mo ago
is astro any good ? havent tried it yet
- efilife 9mo ago
  It's very simple to use. I tried a few static site generators and Astro gave me the most freedom and was the most approachable, pretty much no learning curve. You can use it with MULTIPLE web frameworks at the same time so it's pretty damn great. It gives you many options to do one thing so you can do things your way which is a delight for tinkerers
gulugawa 9mo ago
I found that Vite does a great job of deploying static websites. All I had to do was add Vite as a dev dependency in my pacakge.json and make sure all the page routes in vite.config.js. I've been skeptical about trying Astro because it seems to have unnecessary complexity. Also, I don't see any evidence that Cloudflare is going to prioritize making Astro easier to use.
- Otterlord 9mo ago
  What in Astro would make it easier to use? Or, what makes it more complex to use than you'd like? We're always open to feedback!
  - gulugawa 9mo ago
    The first thing I would do is stop trying to support AI tools, and remove any comments about AI from the documentation. Generative AI is not suitable for building content-driven websites because it lacks context to understand subjective user preferences. Also, having .astro files to implement island functionality is unnecessary. Interactivity can be implemented with Javascript using web components.
    - Otterlord 9mo ago
      Yeah, I agree on the AI front. Although outside of the AI page, I don't believe we have other content on it. It was intentional to keep it separate from the rest of the docs. I know we've recently discussed making changes / removing some of that content. I love web components (one of the things that got me into Astro), but it can be helpful to reach for something like Solid when you get into more complex UI. Most Astro projects will never need to reach for that, which is why there's no UI framework available by default. Astro definitely tries to stick to a minimal defaults approach by design. We'd rather people start from a simple, minimal boilerplate, and reach for solutions (e.g. UI frameworks, on-demand rendering) only when they run into a problem it solves.
- 85392_school 9mo ago
  What are you doing about repeated content?
MORPHOICES 9mo ago
[dead]
promiseofbeans 9mo ago
I’ve been expecting this for a while - their last few releases have all had big features included for their cloudflare adapter
skeptrune 9mo ago
This news made my morning. I can't wait to see how they improve Astro build times and hosting on Cloudflare.
GutenYe 9mo ago
Congrats! I love Astro and published an i18next plugin https://github.com/gutenye/astro-i18next https://github.com/gutenye/astro-i18next
rimmontrieu 9mo ago
This is a great news for Astro. It ticks all the boxes when being used to build heavy content and SEO driven websites. I've been using (Astro + Cloudflare workers/pages) as my go-to stack to build my Java gamedev resources website [1] and gaming portal [2], so far and the experience is very positive. Deploying static files to Cloudflare edges feels natural and frictionless. Still a bit concerned that it might be too tempting to build an entire website infrastructure around cloudflare, which is a single point of failure. But there is really no better alternatives at the moment. I tried self-hosting but eventually resorted to cloudflare because of bad bots, ai, scrappers kept hammering on my sites. [1] https://raizensoft.com/tutorials/ https://raizensoft.com/tutorials/ [2] https://ookigame.com https://ookigame.com
mmooss 9mo ago
I don't understand how Cloudflare's bottom line benefits: Some here say they gain Astro users, that Cloudflare will become part of the default deployment. But given Cloudflare's current scale, how much are Astro's users worth? Is it even worth the distraction for Cloudflare? Companies lose energy to lots of small, low-value operations. Most acquisitions begin with announcments that nothing will change, in order to retain customers and employees. They say '<acquistion> is so great, we don't want to interfere, and we're keeping existing management and letting them run things'. After the transition period - often 1 year - the old managers leave and the big changes happen, sometimes including shutting down the product because it was an acqui-hire all along or an IP acquisition. It seems like Cloudflare must perceive some profit beyond what is announced.
- tonyhart7 9mo ago
  marketshare ??? like do you understand which company doing the same thing ????? Vercel is now we talking, cloudflare want to extend their portofolio and product offering by integrate from top to bottom like vercel does its doens't make sense/oblivious because we view it as standalone product rather than entire suite of product offering that well integrate vertically
- mikodin 9mo ago
  Yeah I see the benefit right off the bat, this is a direct head to Vercel and NextJS. With that said, I have no idea on the market share or profitability of any of that or Cloudflare vs Vercel. Also perhaps the rails that will be put in place for seamless 1 click Astro deploy will continue to push them forward with other technologies as well, so it's not just about Astro. I do feel that fear as well, is this an unnecessary distraction for CloudFlare? Time will tell.
- willtemperley 9mo ago
  They get control and market differentiation. There will probably be a CloudFlare Astro CMS offering. I personally would like a highly managed Astro solution. Astro is simple but highly extendable. I can only hope they wean themselves off NPM somehow.
- alexjurkiewicz 9mo ago
bot_user_7a2b99 9mo ago
[dead]
KetanKhairnar 9mo ago
Been running my technical knowledge base on Astro for about a year now (ketankhairnar.com). Congrats to the team on the acquisition - here's what stood out from a product/engineering perspective: Content modeling that actually scales. Built a three-tier system: Concepts (foundational knowledge) → Deep Dives (series-based learning paths) → Systems (production case studies). Each concept tracks prerequisites, related topics, interview relevance by level (L5-L8), and links back to which deep dives use it. Zod validates everything at build time. This isn't a blog template - it's a knowledge graph with static output. Islands architecture delivers on its promise. React hydrates only for search (Fuse.js across all content types) and a few interactive bits. Rest is zero-JS HTML. Coming from years of Next.js, the bundle size difference is stark. Users on flaky mobile connections notice. Extensibility without framework lock-in. Wrote a custom Shiki transformer for ASCII diagram highlighting - ERROR renders red, FIX green, DECISION orange. Dynamic OG images generated at build via Satori+Resvg. No Lambda cold starts, no external services, just static assets. Infra cost: basically zero. View Transitions shipped before others figured it out. One import, smooth page transitions. Small detail, big UX lift. Where it gets tricky: Complex content relationships require multiple getCollection() calls and manual joins. Works fine, but a query builder would help for sites with heavy cross-linking. Also, the content layer is powerful but documentation assumes simpler use cases. Product observation: Astro found a real gap - content sites that need occasional interactivity but don't want SPA overhead. Most frameworks optimize for apps and retrofit content. Astro did the opposite and it shows. Curious how Cloudflare integration plays out. Edge rendering + this content model could be interesting for personalization without sacrificing static performance.
alexpadula 9mo ago
Awesome!
deleted 9mo ago
[deleted]
kjgkjhfkjf 9mo ago
Cloudflare's goal is to become the default choice for anyone deploying an app to the cloud. It makes sense for them to support popular frameworks such as Astro, so that they can ensure that the frameworks work very well on their Workers platform.
- dzogchen 9mo ago
  Anyone except users that need to serve the German market. Due to peering issues with the biggest German ISP that have been unresolved for years, websites hosted with Cloudflare simply don’t load in the evening.
guihubie 9mo ago
Astro is life!
lupefiasko 9mo ago
[dead]
jimmyl02 9mo ago
Astro is my favorite framework for static sites. It's hard to describe but it just "makes sense". You don't need complex build setups and you can get the best of all worlds with great SSG capabilities + can easily express things with React when needed for example. I wish there was another path to monetization besides joining a larger company but I'm happy that the team will get to continue building out an amazing framework!
dvcoolarun 9mo ago
Open source alone can’t sustain companies long-term. Eventually everyone needs a bigger, safer home.
ziemann 9mo ago
[dead]
tffarhad 9mo ago
Wow, amazing news. At Themefisher, we’ve built 40+ Astro templates used by hundreds of Astro devs and many client sites. Also great to hear it was Cloudflare!! Hope Astro keeps growing.
TeamCommet1 9mo ago
This was inevitable. We're seeing the "Vercel-ification" of the edge. For a long time, Cloudflare had the superior infrastructure (Workers, R2, KV), but lacked the cohesive "onramp" that Next.js provides for Vercel. By acquiring Astro, Cloudflare finally owns the full stack, from the local dev experience to the global edge delivery. The real question is whether Cloudflare can maintain Astro's "framework agnostic" soul while being incentivized to push everyone toward Workers/Pages.

960 points by todotask2 9mo ago

pier25 9mo ago

Astro is amazing. I've been using it for a couple of years now. Initially only for static sites but now I'm building the UI of all my web projects with it. I wonder if there will be some sort of collab between Hono and Astro given that Yusukue also works at Cloudflare.

upcoming-sesame 9mo ago
Yup, there's a lot of overlap especially with the HonoX framework that has island architecture as well!
TurdF3rguson 9mo ago
This is the main thing for me. If I can keep the cf workers backend in the same repo and deploy them together I will consider leaving Next.js for good.

mpeg 9mo ago

This is cool, I use astro when I just want to spin up a quick site without having to fight the framework (looking at you, Nextjs) and the main thing I disliked was the initiatives around paid extras they had going Astro and Tanstack are probably the best full-stack routers these days, and Astro wins in terms of the wide support for almost any client-side tech

phartenfeller 9mo ago

Why does Cloudflare need a web framework? Most obvious would be they think they can make money from hosting astro sites (like Vercel and NextJS). I hope Cloudflare's impact on Astro will be tiny. But another great thing being swallowed by big tech...

arcanemachiner 9mo ago
> But another great thing being swallowed by big tech... I will never use Cloudflare if I can help it, but this outcome is preferable to Astro becoming abandonware.
- phartenfeller 9mo ago
  There are so many more options than being acquired and abandonware. Its hard but there are many independent and stable open source projects.
arcfour 9mo ago
This is overly cynical without reason. CloudFlare is hardly "big tech" even if it is a "big" "tech" company. They have no record of killing or abusing open source projects.
- blibble 9mo ago
  > CloudFlare is hardly "big tech" yeah, it's still losing money
  - aiiizzz 9mo ago
    [flagged]
    - blibble 9mo ago
      > according to Gemini thanks for the unrequested slop! you know what GAAP stands for? "generally accepted accounting practices" so what does non-gaap mean? "non-generally accepted accounting practices" aka: bullshit
    - efilife 9mo ago
      why are you doing this?
      - 9mo ago

tnolet 9mo ago

Refreshing to see an acquisition (acquihire?) that just plainly says they were not able to monetize.

philipallstar 9mo ago

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.

pxtail 9mo ago
It's obvious when you look at https://astro.build/blog/astro-6-beta/ https://astro.build/blog/astro-6-beta/ and see "Cloudflare" sprinkled everywhere in the article.
lateral_cloud 9mo ago
Mindshare with developers is what cloudflare gets
philipwhiuk 9mo ago
Feels like they are trying to do vertical integration on the whole stack and compete with Vercel.
- pjmlp 9mo ago
  For me, anyone that tries to compete with Vercel has to beat their offering in backend runtimes.
mpeg 9mo ago
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)

weli 9mo ago

Nice. I love astro and I love cloudflare. Most of my static pages are that stack.

koakuma-chan 9mo ago

I am very disappointed with Astro. Who is this framework for? It's been years, and they still don't support unit testing Astro Actions. They still don't support inter-island communication. "Astro v6 is around the corner" - and the only changes are 1. refactored CLI (why? it's perfectly fine) 2. bumped zod to v4 It's great if you want to build a blog or something, but it's definitely far from great for building apps. Don't know what they are thinking.

philipwhiuk 9mo ago
If all you are writing a blog and you're not using Substack or Squarespace or any of the other million blog hosting options you're crazy IMO.
- pier25 9mo ago
  Substack only really makes sense if you want to monetize your content.
- re5i5tor 9mo ago
  If you aren’t realizing the importance of POSSE imho that’s crazy ;-)
- upcoming-sesame 9mo ago
  Why ? Spinning up a blog these days with one of these frameworks is almost quicker than signing up to one of the blog hosting platforms. And you get to keep your data in markdown easily portable
- array_key_first 9mo ago
  You become beholden to these platforms and they're inherently not portable. There is risk here, and given the track record of Internet companies I think it's fair to say the risk is not worth it for many people. Your costs could explode, or worse, the business could go under and you lose all your shit.
drawfloat 9mo ago
I don't think it's really targeted at building apps, as far as I can tell its whole pitch has always been that that most websites are not apps and therefore most websites do not need a full JS framework like Next.js. They even say it in this blog: "Our mission to design a web framework specifically for building websites — what we call content-driven websites, to better distinguish from data-driven, stateful web applications — resonated"

embedding-shape 9mo ago

> In 2021, Astro was born out of frustration. The trend at the time was that every website should be architected as an application, and then shipped to the user’s browser to render. Was it? Hot damn, I knew it'll eventually happen, but we truly are just running around in circles. Eventually these same people will do the same loop around, creating new frameworks because the current "server<>client" model suddenly doesn't make any sense anymore, and of course this should be rendered server-side. Why are we doomed to repeat this, and why does it happen so quickly particularly in web development? We have each other's histories and knowledge right in front of us, what's missing for us to not continue just running around in circles like this?

boxed 9mo ago
[flagged]
philipwhiuk 9mo ago
Yeah, I'm not sure I understand why "islands" isn't just "bits of JavaScript on a static page". It feels like the "JavaScript as a Server Side Language" folk are just repeatedly re-inventing stuff that has been done a million times by other systems with a different back-end only with a new fancy name.
- verdverm 9mo ago
  The have Rust now so the entire tooling layer can justifiably be rewritten a few more times
- mpeg 9mo ago
  The key difference between islands and what we used to do back in the day (js on a static page) is that with an islands approach you architect your site with a components-driven approach where everything encapsulates the js/css/html it needs, then you mark it as an "interactive" island if you actually need client-side js to run – the code is the same, but it either runs only in the server (default) or in both server and client. I know this sounds similar, but, compared to the more traditional approach, there is a certain simplicity to having everything just be javascript. You can often run the same libraries on both server and client depending on your needs, plus it fulfills the promise of web components in a way that is easier to work with (though WCs have also come a long way!)

saltytostitos 9mo ago

Cloudflare: Astro Vercel: NuxtLabs, Next. All open source. What a strange competition.

jcmfernandes 9mo ago

Damn. What alternatives does HN recommend?

arcanemachiner 9mo ago
Well, there's this other project that recently secured funding from a company that has a proven track record of supporting great open-source projects like Astro, TanStack, and Hono without trying to capture or lock anything down. There's even an article about it somewhere.
azangru 9mo ago
Eleventy, of course :-) But why are you looking for alternatives already?
- jcmfernandes 9mo ago
  I'm not! Just preparing myself for the worst-case scenario and creating some bookmarks meanwhile.
- throwawa71973 9mo ago
  Dropped eleventy recently. Disliked the templating solutions, the messy documentation, the loss in momentum, and liked a lot of the stuff (especially the tooling and principles) in astro. Also strongly disliked how political eleventy got. I just wanted a website, not a an internal debate about what I am potentially being absorbed into. I can vote, and spend money on donations, I don't need to enact change through my tech stack.
  - wahnfrieden 9mo ago
    What are you referring to re: it getting political?
evantbyrne 9mo ago
I experimented a lot with bootstrapping React projects this past fall, and Astro was by far the least painful to use. Notably, it was the least goofy of all of the React starter kits to use for server API development.

quentindanjou 9mo ago

After Netlify acquired GatsbyJS, I am not very hopeful about the future of Astro. I hope to be wrong because Astro is a great framework.

azangru 9mo ago
It still baffles me why Netlify did that. Gatsby seemed to have already been dying, even before the acquisition; and it didn't look like Netlify was planning to invest in it.
- ascorbic 9mo ago
  Netlify didn't buy Gatsby for the framework. They wanted the hosting business and the GraphQL thing. They said this at the time, and it's true. It was barely resourced. Cloudflare is only interested in the framework (because Astro has nothing else). Source/disclosure: I worked at Gatsby, Netlify, Astro and Cloudflare
  - azangru 9mo ago
    Why did they want Gatsby's graphQL thing? What was attractive about it?
    - ascorbic 9mo ago
      Seemed a good idea at the time. The unified data layer was always the best thing about Gatsby (which is why I nicked the idea for the Astro content layer), but maybe not as a hosted product

shibel 9mo ago

Astro is great. It checks all of my checkboxes. I hope this is not the beginning of the end.

tin7in 9mo ago

Astro is great and I hope they keep improving after the acquisition. Given what agents can do, I feel a lot of the sites built on Webflow, Framer and so on will move to code and Astro is a great framework for this.

__jonas 9mo ago

I like the idea behind Astro, I've used it for a couple websites here and there. I'm a bit worried about the complexity brought by Astro supporting all these different frameworks through its adapters, and how stable and maintainable those websites will be in the future. For instance: I've been using Astro with Svelte to build static sites with some components that require client-side interactivity. I really like that Astro doesn't ship any JS by default and just outputs static HTML, and when I want some page to have an interactive JS component, Svelte is an option that produces a relatively small amount of client JS. But: Using Svelte with Astro this way for static sites has been broken since August 2025. As soon as you have a conditionally rendered child component in Svelte, Astro fails to bundle the styles for it in the static output of the site, and it does that ONLY in production, which is really devious, you could build a whole site (using astro dev) without knowing and then it breaks when you deploy it. The issue is here: https://github.com/withastro/astro/issues/14252 https://github.com/withastro/astro/issues/14252 I don't want to be complaining about how quickly issues get addressed in an OSS project that I'm not paying for, I don't blame them for not keeping tabs on every framework integration, I just would love to build websites with the latest versions Astro and Svelte, and I unfortunately have the feeling I should have just gone with SvelteKit for a smoother experience.

giancarlostoro 9mo ago
I havent had a chance to fully use it in a project yet, but it is one of my favorite projects only tinker with it, I'm glad it will receive funding to keep it going. It is definitely a solid gem of open source since its not married to one single SPA framework.
- __jonas 9mo ago
  Yeah I suppose it's a tradeoff. I have had an excellent experience when not hydrating components at all, and I like their approach significantly more than other SSGs overall. My worry is just the massive scope of supporting integrations with all those frameworks AND its own .astro language / syntax AND server side rendering in addition to static generation.

maxencecornet 9mo ago

Very unexpected but it's a great match. I have been using Astro with Cloudflare Pages and the dev UX is fantastic

re5i5tor 9mo ago

I use Astro deployed on Cloudflare, blog-newsletter kind of site [1], moved over from Hugo. If this keeps Astro viable then it seems like a net win. [1] https://cto4.ai https://cto4.ai

re5i5tor 9mo ago
Based on a request presumably from a HN viewer, I made the repo [2] for this site public. [2] https://github.com/cto4ai/cto4ai-blog https://github.com/cto4ai/cto4ai-blog

MarkusAllen 9mo ago

[flagged]

mp05 9mo ago
Holy survivorship bias Batman, and yeah, nice punchy AI sentences you got there.
pjmlp 9mo ago
> Linux: 33 years old, runs the internet, community-funded Only in dreams, it took off thanks to the likes of IBM that decided it was a way to save costs on their UNIX development efforts, many key projects have been founded thanks to Red-Hat Enterprise licenses, nowadays also part of IBM. GCC, clang, GNOME, Linux kernel, systemd, CUPS, AMD/NVidia drivers, have plenty of big corp money. From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Linux https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Linux "1998: Many major companies such as IBM, Compaq and Oracle announce their support for Linux."
- haolez 9mo ago
  Big corp money is not VC money. That's the point.
  - pjmlp 9mo ago
    Depends on which corporation.
    - halestock 9mo ago
      No, it depends on whether they have an ownership stake in what they’re funding or not.
      - pjmlp 9mo ago
        All a matter of if the project dies when the money fountain runs dry, and developers have to find another way to pay bills other than a few meagre donations.

ramon156 9mo ago

Perfect direction! Astro has been incredible for small static pages. CF workers are also really easy to impl

angelfangs 9mo ago

Tried Astro after being utterly confused with Hugo templating and found it rather over-engineered. Went with 11tty instead and don't regret it.

suyash 9mo ago

Another open source framework likely be dead soon, what are the alternatives ?

wahnfrieden 9mo ago

This sucks

fnoef 9mo ago

Welp, I'm worried. I like Astro, but maybe it's time to make my own SSG, to not ever end up in the hand of a few big-sharks that consolidate and enshittify everything.

sieep 9mo ago
jumped on the same train, still using astro in production but on the side im using Elixir to create an SSG to use moving forward for anything new.
adzm 9mo ago
Fork it and call it Cosmo

lifetimerubyist 9mo ago

So this is what happens to open source now? It runs out of money and one of the big corpos gobbles it up. Lovely. I think donating to the Apache Foundation is preferable.

yawnxyz 9mo ago

Surprised this isn't in the article, but Cloudflare has been moving all their docs to Astro's Starlight docs framework. I'm guessing this is a way to prioritize features for Cloudflare: > https://blog.cloudflare.com/open-source-all-the-way-down-upgrading-our-developer-documentation/ https://blog.cloudflare.com/open-source-all-the-way-down-upg...

fr3dx 9mo ago
It is mentioned in the cloudflare blog post [1] "At Cloudflare, we use Astro, too — for our developer docs, website, landing pages, and more" [1] https://blog.cloudflare.com/astro-joins-cloudflare/ https://blog.cloudflare.com/astro-joins-cloudflare/
buu700 9mo ago
Coincidentally, I just migrated some support docs to Starlight a few hours before this acquisition announcement. Really nice framework.

pcthrowaway 9mo ago

I'm incredibly relieved they didn't join Vercel (which everyone else seems to be doing these days).

stared 9mo ago

I love Astro - migrated my blog there (here it was a gradual improvement), migrated company website there (here a lot, to joy of everyone). In the times of vibe coding, there is much less reason to use WYSWIG website editors. In our company, a non-technical assistant, modified website with Claude Code. I hope that this acquisition will go well. It would be sad to lose this great framework. At the same time, we deploy on Cloudflare. So their business is to keep Astro cool so that more people will use Claudflare, it would be a win-win!

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dkhenry 9mo ago

Astro on Cloudflare workers has been my goto stack for multiple years now. I am very happy with it, and hope this makes the integration stronger. Now we just need Cloudflare to buy one of the DBaaS companies so they have a solid relational offering.

upcoming-sesame 9mo ago
What about Cloudflare D1?
- dkhenry 9mo ago
  D1 is fine when it fits the use case, but most of the time I just want Postgres that I will use for absolutely everything. It has happened often enough that I have tried to make systems work with other storage systems, and eventually just give up and revert to Postgres. Every time I just start with Postgres I don't have issues until it turns out my laziness has caused a performance problem, and those I can fix.
- Squarex 9mo ago
  It's quite slow.
samtp 9mo ago
Even just having a better DX/UI around D1 and their other current offerings would be a great start
- jtbaker 9mo ago
  I'd love to see D1 as a supported catalog for https://ducklake.select/ https://ducklake.select/
hdra 9mo ago
I noticed the astro docs has lot of mention of Cloudflare worker as well, is there any reason why you didnt go with Cloudflare pages instead? I’d have guessed pages would be the perfect fit for hosting a rendered astro website

nindalf 9mo ago

I’ve used Astro on Cloudflare for a few years for my personal website (username.com). They’ve both been absolutely fantastic, I can’t say enough good things about both of them. My website has all 100s on PageSpeed/Lighthouse, and that’s because of the performance focus of both Astro and Cloudflare. No credit to me at all. It was mainly because Astro prioritised shipping 0 JS unless it was absolutely necessary and Cloudflare is exceedingly good at serving static HTML. But I also see the difficulty that Astro faced here. Despite being happy with the framework, I never paid for it. The paid offerings didn’t strike a chord with me. And it was partly because whatever they offered, Cloudflare already offered on a very generous free tier. I'm glad the team have got a second life within Cloudflare,. I'm happy for the people who've given me such excellent software for free for years. Thanks folks!

kevinskii 9mo ago
Likewise! I built my personal blog with Astro and host on Cloudflare (username.dev), and feel guilty about taking advantage of such excellent software and free tier. Here’s hoping they find a way to take my money soon.
BenGosub 9mo ago
amazing performance.
deepfriedbits 9mo ago
I appreciate your honest testimonial. It's so rare these days to read a sentence like, "No credit to me at all" haha
ljm 9mo ago
Out of curiosity, how do you become ‘exceedingly good’ at serving static HTML? By all accounts, they’ve centralised the delivery of this static HTML at several layers of the network stack, and you’re not getting static HTML anymore because some other part of the business fucked it up. The World Wide Web was serving static HTML for decades before Cloudflare came along. Open an FTP client, drag and drop, and boom - new HTMl is served.

827a 9mo ago

Astro is my favorite way to build websites (at least, of the kind its great at) and I'm happy for the team; Cloudflare is a super cool place to work. Excited to see in what directions this will develop. They have a real shot at being the next Next.

akmittal 9mo ago

I hope CLoudflare or another tech company buy deno. Deno is great, its lacking a big brand sponsorship.

bobnamob 9mo ago
Cloudflare are neck deep in v8 as their js runtime of choice. I doubt they'll be looking for another any time soon

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bryanhogan 9mo ago

My favorite framework, and what has brought me much deeper into the world of web development. It's what I have used for me personal page https://bryanhogan.com/ https://bryanhogan.com/ . I'm happy to see it get funding, although I hope this doesn't introduce entshittification. So far I'm hopeful though. It's the first framework I recommend to web dev beginners, after they have built something with plain HTML and CSS.

Alifatisk 9mo ago

Wow, these are the same people behind Pika/Skypack and Snowpack. I can remember the day when they announced the Astro project, and now it's joining Cloudflare, incredible progress.

jtbaker 9mo ago
I'm glad they were able to pivot into Astro when Vite won the hot dev server game a few years back.

nozzlegear 9mo ago

I'm a little wary of this. I'd been using Gatsby for my static websites for a long time, until it got eaten up by Netlify and then sunset; I switched over to Astro at that point, but now I'm getting a sense of déjà vu.

piffey 9mo ago
Just setup my personal blog again after a four years hiatus using Astro (loved the good docs). Kind of disappointed, but given how simple static site generators are, probably something Claude could crank out easily with parity of features I actually use then wouldn't be beholden to any project's creators.
deleted 9mo ago
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brunoarueira 9mo ago
I had moved out from Gatsby to Astro on my blog/site (username.com), mostly because the enormous dependency hell full of security issues, I know it's just things to generate static files, but it was causing a lot of headaches to upgrade and remove the issues. With Astro, I receive a lot less issues and the maintenance is easier! From my perspective if Cloudflare keep it that way, it'll be a win.
- nozzlegear 9mo ago
  > I had moved out from Gatsby to Astro on my blog/site (username.com), mostly because the enormous dependency hell full of security issues, I know it's just things to generate static files, but it was causing a lot of headaches to upgrade and remove the issues. That's exactly what made me move to Astro. I would've been happy sticking with Gatsby since it still technically does what it says on the tin, but there were so many security warnings and issues with upgrading dependencies that I gave up.
jakubmazanec 9mo ago
Gatsby was sunset because it was a bad framework build on bad decisions [1]. I tried to use it when it was new, and it was immediately obvious that "GraphQL for everything" leads to horrible DX. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39619110 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39619110

Imustaskforhelp 9mo ago

From a developer perspecive, I was going to go "Ahh shit here we go again" But to be really honest, thinking more about it. atleast from an "AI" bubble perspective, Cloudflare is pretty rock solid and isn't involved in the AI bubble deals whereas vercel has If you were to use cloudflare workers say the past few months, you would've noticed some serious UI/UX improvements and its projects highlighted astro template was one of the first things (I think second was sveltekit iirc) Anyways thinking about it now, I am sure that cloudflare must have been in talks with them for quite some time and they had the astro deployments on cloudflare workers so they must have seen its usage and other data we have no idea about to justify this purchase That being said, I had been part of astro community almost exactly the time they had partnered up with turso (It was my holidays so I wanted to build a website from scratch, I sadly lost it but it was really cool and it had BMO from adventure time's pixel art that I lost oof :<) So I was in their discord when they had just joined turso for astro DB and at that point, you couldn't host it locally (some tried with wasm) not sure what's the reality now though. But its interesting to see this because cloudflare offers a turso (serverless sqlite) alternative as Cloudflare D1, So we might see Astro shift to d1? Once again, I have not been part of community for almost around 1-2 years so I don't know the current state of Astro aside from tweaking around making my own custom editor in bun for some astro templates (astro templates are really cool) Perhaps, we are gonna see astro templates website + cloudflare workers to create an instant deployment of astro templates on cloudflare workers as a first class citizen. Honestly I would love that because cf workers/pages are free/cheapest in the whole market. I hope that Astro still stays local first and still its serverless features can benefit everybody and not just cloudflare (looking at you vercel for nextjs)

Otterlord 9mo ago
Yep, Astro is and will always be platform-agnostic!

ndsipa_pomu 9mo ago

Did they just break Cloudflare?

jasona123 9mo ago

Only mildly surprising - Astro + CF Pages/Workers have been my go-to for when I want to spin up a static site or do anything else and it does feel like they've been really working on the integration between the two.

cdrnsf 9mo ago

I don’t want a framework that’s coupled to a hosting provider.

pier25 9mo ago
It's not and will probably never be. If you want some precedent look at Hono. Initially it was just for the CF Workers runtime (not developed by CF). Then CF started using Hono internally and hired the dev to work on Hono full time. Hono works on any JS runtime. https://hono.dev/docs/concepts/web-standard https://hono.dev/docs/concepts/web-standard
- cdrnsf 9mo ago
  I suppose we’ll see — I’d be surprised if the whole promise of nothing will change don’t hold over the long term. I don’t love that Astro is tied to a narrow set of hosting providers either.
  - pier25 9mo ago
    Astro runs on many JS runtimes. It can be deployed anywhere.

hexbin010 9mo ago

I knew it was too good to last hah Congratulations!

Havoc 9mo ago

I hope they maintain a clear path to delay separately too. With these sort of combinations the deploy to cloudflare button gets ever bigger than over time. And then features get added that only work with CF and eventually it’s still open source but only half the stuff works standalone etc That said - good for them.

victorbjorklund 9mo ago

Oh no. This isn’t good. I’m glad that the team gets a payout but as an Astro user I don’t love it being owned by CF and that the goals of the project (at least indirectly) goes from the best way to deploy it to the best way to deploy it using CF.

sp4cec0wb0y 9mo ago
I don't anticipate it changing like that. You still do a build using Vite and deploy the static assets. How could they change that to make it difficult to host elsewhere?
- victorbjorklund 9mo ago
  Let’s hope you’re right. I think vendor lock in is possible if they focus on features tightly coupled to Cloudflare. Look at Next.js. In theory you can deploy it anywhere, but in practice it is harder outside Vercel because of tight coupling around things like caching. You do not have to use those features, but if the framework is built to expect them, it pushes people into that platform. I can imagine Astro becoming very attractive to use with Cloudflare Workers and slowly locking people into that model.
  - dvtkrlbs 9mo ago
    It is not similar imho. First NextJS build system is not really exposed apart from a simple docker example and all advanced features of NextJS is kinda coupled to Vercel. For Astro it is just a Vite project with integration designed from day mind they would have to rip everything apart and that would probably cause a prominent fork. The other part is Cloudflare is not dependent Astro being vendor locked as much as Vercel being dependent on NextJS being vendor locked.
    - victorbjorklund 9mo ago
      Let’s hope you are being right. Note that I am not talking about Astro today but rather Astro in 5 years.

etchalon 9mo ago

Vercel buys frameworks. Cloudflare does the same. We all lose while they all tell us we're winning.

ramesh31 9mo ago

Vercel 2.0

arjie 9mo ago

Very nice to see these dev tools get an exit. e.g. I love `uv` and friends but did consider that perhaps dev tools are just a bad business and then no one will go into making that kind of stuff. Good exits means more of these tools. I have only used Astro for toy stuff but it seemed neat. Congrats to the team. EDIT: To put paid to the sidebar discussion below, yes I meant "for instance, consider `uv`; they might do these nice things and go nowhere but now that companies like Bun and Astro have gotten acquired, it demonstrates a future for others; therefore we will get more things like Astral's `uv` and so on". Hope that clarifies.

woodruffw 9mo ago
This is Astro, not Astral. uv is Astral :-) Edit: OP clarified what they meant, I'm sorry for the misunderstanding on my part!
- satvikpendem 9mo ago
  They know, hence why they used e.g., i.e. exempli gratia
  - woodruffw 9mo ago
    I don't think that's really clear. I think we could both defer to the OP clarifying. For pedantry's sake: neither i.e. nor e.g. would be correct here. You want cf. ("conferatur") to invite a comparison; e.g. is when an example pertains to an instance. In this case uv would not pertain to the instance, because Astro is not Astral.
    - 0xFF0123 9mo ago
      cf. would invite a fair bit of confusion on an article about cloudflare
      - woodruffw 9mo ago
        I agree! That's why I think it's probably just a confusion between entities. It doesn't make sense either as example or as a comparison (although IMO it makes more sense as the latter). (For the OP: I'm sorry if I misinterpreted you.)

stefanos82 9mo ago

I hope they've got rewarded astro...nomically well lol! My apologies friends, I could not resist! Congrats Astro team!

mattgreenrocks 9mo ago

Hope that SSR remains first class as time goes on. I think Astro’s DX is superb overall, and am bullish on server-rendered components in MPAs with a sprinkling of hypermedia libs for better UX. Some features of my SSR-based side project feel like I had to hack them on, such as a hook that runs only on app start (hacked in via middleware) or manually needing to set cache control headers for auth’d content. All in all, really happy with it. And it isn’t next.js.

bigblind 9mo ago

i'd personalloy love a quick video demo on the home screen, with someone walking through the experience of using the app; other than that, looks interesting;

kylecazar 9mo ago

Great for Astro.. About the download stats for open source frameworks and libraries.. I keep reading claims of "millions of weekly downloads" -- surely this is a noisy metric, right? NPM just counts GET requests. A significant number of those must be from CI/CD pipelines, mirrors, build servers, etc. It still signals popularity, but probably to a much lesser degree than implied.

wiether 9mo ago
How to measure the popularity of FOSS projects though? Number of downloads? Number of stars on GH? Number of content on social medias? The absolute value is meaningless in itself, but there's a big difference between a library that is downloaded a thousand or millions of times each week. That's the idea. Meanwhile for-profit projects have actual customers or revenues to demonstrate popularity.
- 1718627440 9mo ago
  Availability in Debian, is the measure I personally use.
shimman 9mo ago
VC still use github stars as a viable metric, at some point you have to say aloud that they are basically engaging in shammanism and ritual sacrifices.

slfreference 9mo ago

This spam LLM account "MarkusAllen" (towards the very end) could be used by an adversory to discredit books / courses /"youtube channel" they link to. This is reverse psychology attack vector made possible by an LLM.

endorphine 9mo ago

> Now Astro is downloaded almost 1,000,000 times per week [...] Are these numbers supposed to provide any sense of the popularity if you're not often looking at npm trends?

endorphine 9mo ago

Is that a good deal for the employees of Astro? They're now Cloudflare employees, which I guess looks good on your CV. But do such acquihires usually result in higher salaries for regular (non-leadership) employees or? Also, what about NSOs?

yusufnb 9mo ago

I have always liked Astro. It also works great with AI tools since its combination of markdown and code. Was able to vibe code a quick blog template and deploy to cloudflare in minutes with an existing headless backend - https://sleekcms-astro-blog.pages.dev/ https://sleekcms-astro-blog.pages.dev/

gulugawa 9mo ago
This is making me even less interested in trying Astro. Websites should not be vibe coded.
- Firehawke 9mo ago
  So.. just because a tool can be potentially mishandled (e.g. put in the hands of a toddler, which is basically what vibe code ends up being) because it's easy to use, you never want to take a look at said tool? That sounds like shooting yourself in the foot out of pure spite, but you do you.
  - gulugawa 9mo ago
    Astro is enabling vibe coders with a section of the documentation that gives advice on using AI, an Astro docs MCP server, and a copy of the documentation that is specifically formatted for LLM use.
- yusufnb 9mo ago
  The code is vibe-coded. Not the content. Which I think is more important for a blog site.

naiv 9mo ago

Love Astro and it is exactly my stack with Cloudflare but wow, the "Forward-Looking Statements" disclaimer is longer than the press release itself

bilater 9mo ago

Astro to Cloudflare, Bun to Anthropic. Good trend seeing people toiling away at OS financially rewarded.

itsafarqueue 9mo ago
Two whole projects. A stampede.
- bilater 9mo ago
  big beloved projects
TiredOfLife 9mo ago
Big difference is that Anthropic blocks competitors from using its products (they literally cut direct api access. Or even through 3rd party like Cursor).

sidcool 9mo ago

Cloudflare is getting into static site hosting game, like Vercel.

mb2100 9mo ago

Congrats to Fred and team! Developing and maintaining a complex framework takes lots of funding, and I’m glad Astro found a new home that provides that. With [Mastro], we have a different approach. The name originally stood for "minimal Astro", and we’re staying true to that. At just ~700 lines of TypeScript, Mastro will always be easily maintainable – even if by just a single person. And it's amazing how much you can do if you're very deliberate in your API's design. [Mastro]: https://mastrojs.github.io/ https://mastrojs.github.io/

pantulis 9mo ago

Adobe could have benefited from doing this acquisition but they can be somewhat forgiven as they are already pushing Edge Delivery Services which is based in NextJS although it's a different approach. Combined with the Universal Editor they have a solid headless authoring setup for enterprise CMS. But I really feel like Akamai is who dropped the ball here, this was a low hanging fruit for them and they're lacking offering this capability to offer their corporate clients as they transition to full headless. Now it's going to be their competition (Cloudflare, even Fastly through Adobe & the EDS push) who will try to take a portion of their cake.

bastawhiz 9mo ago

I've been using Astro for a couple years and it's delightful. I actually started using it for my docs because I saw Cloudflare was using it. I hope they are a good steward of the tech!

mmarian 9mo ago

Makes perfect sense. I use Astro with Cloudflare for all my frontend projects.

MaintenanceMode 9mo ago

I love astro, it's been such a pleasure to use and totally solved my need for a flexible platform. I managed to retire a bunch of Wordpress sites and I've never looked back. Hopefully I can still run it on netlify.

8cvor6j844qw_d6 9mo ago

What's the next best/popular alternative to Astro? Used this for a portfolio site and and not sure if this news is good or bad for its future.

supernes 9mo ago
I'm not jumping off Astro yet, but if I did I would probably go to Vike (https://vike.dev/ https://vike.dev/)

isodev 9mo ago

Oh wow, Cloudflare enschitification is practically in real time right now.

BenGosub 9mo ago

All wrongs in Gatsby have been gotten right in Astro. What will happen next remains to be seen, but currently Astro is amazing for a few specific cases it covers. The performance, developer experience and documentation are all great.

Strongbad536 9mo ago

ITT People arguing about how cloudflare is gonna unfairly favor their own platform and lock people in by making easier to deploy astro sites as if you can't already do it just by connecting a git repo to cloudflare pages with 1 click.

maximgeorge 9mo ago

[dead]

chrisweekly 9mo ago

Crossing fingers (but not holding breath) this doesn't lead to vendor lock-in or otherwise wreck Astro.

kylehotchkiss 9mo ago
Cloudflare doesn't need to vendor lock astro like vercel needed to vendor lock next. They have a massive amount of other things to sell.
- chrisweekly 9mo ago
  I know. Still, not holding breath.

w10-1 9mo ago

I agree a good exit for devtools is good for devtools. I'd like to understand it better. The Astro claim is that astro developers will all continue full-time on it. So why acquire it instead of supporting it? The reason given in complementarity (content and infrastructure), but doesn't that mean that Cloudflare is moving into content? Perhaps it's fair to say some content fits better with Cloudflare, or making it easier to just have static sites is beneficial to Cloudflare? Is there a convention about announcements, for the acquired to announce happily first to bring customers, and then the acquirer to confirm their benign intentions? When can we expect Cloudflare's take?

re-thc 9mo ago
> The Astro claim is that astro developers will all continue full-time on it. So why acquire it instead of supporting it? In defense? Someone else can acquire it.
sixo 9mo ago
> So why acquire it instead of supporting it? Lots of reasons, but above all, control.

frivx 9mo ago

is astro any good ? havent tried it yet

efilife 9mo ago
It's very simple to use. I tried a few static site generators and Astro gave me the most freedom and was the most approachable, pretty much no learning curve. You can use it with MULTIPLE web frameworks at the same time so it's pretty damn great. It gives you many options to do one thing so you can do things your way which is a delight for tinkerers

gulugawa 9mo ago

I found that Vite does a great job of deploying static websites. All I had to do was add Vite as a dev dependency in my pacakge.json and make sure all the page routes in vite.config.js. I've been skeptical about trying Astro because it seems to have unnecessary complexity. Also, I don't see any evidence that Cloudflare is going to prioritize making Astro easier to use.

Otterlord 9mo ago
What in Astro would make it easier to use? Or, what makes it more complex to use than you'd like? We're always open to feedback!
- gulugawa 9mo ago
  The first thing I would do is stop trying to support AI tools, and remove any comments about AI from the documentation. Generative AI is not suitable for building content-driven websites because it lacks context to understand subjective user preferences. Also, having .astro files to implement island functionality is unnecessary. Interactivity can be implemented with Javascript using web components.
  - Otterlord 9mo ago
    Yeah, I agree on the AI front. Although outside of the AI page, I don't believe we have other content on it. It was intentional to keep it separate from the rest of the docs. I know we've recently discussed making changes / removing some of that content. I love web components (one of the things that got me into Astro), but it can be helpful to reach for something like Solid when you get into more complex UI. Most Astro projects will never need to reach for that, which is why there's no UI framework available by default. Astro definitely tries to stick to a minimal defaults approach by design. We'd rather people start from a simple, minimal boilerplate, and reach for solutions (e.g. UI frameworks, on-demand rendering) only when they run into a problem it solves.
85392_school 9mo ago
What are you doing about repeated content?

MORPHOICES 9mo ago

[dead]

promiseofbeans 9mo ago

I’ve been expecting this for a while - their last few releases have all had big features included for their cloudflare adapter

skeptrune 9mo ago

This news made my morning. I can't wait to see how they improve Astro build times and hosting on Cloudflare.

GutenYe 9mo ago

Congrats! I love Astro and published an i18next plugin https://github.com/gutenye/astro-i18next https://github.com/gutenye/astro-i18next

rimmontrieu 9mo ago

This is a great news for Astro. It ticks all the boxes when being used to build heavy content and SEO driven websites. I've been using (Astro + Cloudflare workers/pages) as my go-to stack to build my Java gamedev resources website [1] and gaming portal [2], so far and the experience is very positive. Deploying static files to Cloudflare edges feels natural and frictionless. Still a bit concerned that it might be too tempting to build an entire website infrastructure around cloudflare, which is a single point of failure. But there is really no better alternatives at the moment. I tried self-hosting but eventually resorted to cloudflare because of bad bots, ai, scrappers kept hammering on my sites. [1] https://raizensoft.com/tutorials/ https://raizensoft.com/tutorials/ [2] https://ookigame.com https://ookigame.com

mmooss 9mo ago

I don't understand how Cloudflare's bottom line benefits: Some here say they gain Astro users, that Cloudflare will become part of the default deployment. But given Cloudflare's current scale, how much are Astro's users worth? Is it even worth the distraction for Cloudflare? Companies lose energy to lots of small, low-value operations. Most acquisitions begin with announcments that nothing will change, in order to retain customers and employees. They say '<acquistion> is so great, we don't want to interfere, and we're keeping existing management and letting them run things'. After the transition period - often 1 year - the old managers leave and the big changes happen, sometimes including shutting down the product because it was an acqui-hire all along or an IP acquisition. It seems like Cloudflare must perceive some profit beyond what is announced.

tonyhart7 9mo ago
marketshare ??? like do you understand which company doing the same thing ????? Vercel is now we talking, cloudflare want to extend their portofolio and product offering by integrate from top to bottom like vercel does its doens't make sense/oblivious because we view it as standalone product rather than entire suite of product offering that well integrate vertically
mikodin 9mo ago
Yeah I see the benefit right off the bat, this is a direct head to Vercel and NextJS. With that said, I have no idea on the market share or profitability of any of that or Cloudflare vs Vercel. Also perhaps the rails that will be put in place for seamless 1 click Astro deploy will continue to push them forward with other technologies as well, so it's not just about Astro. I do feel that fear as well, is this an unnecessary distraction for CloudFlare? Time will tell.
willtemperley 9mo ago
They get control and market differentiation. There will probably be a CloudFlare Astro CMS offering. I personally would like a highly managed Astro solution. Astro is simple but highly extendable. I can only hope they wean themselves off NPM somehow.
alexjurkiewicz 9mo ago

bot_user_7a2b99 9mo ago

[dead]

KetanKhairnar 9mo ago

Been running my technical knowledge base on Astro for about a year now (ketankhairnar.com). Congrats to the team on the acquisition - here's what stood out from a product/engineering perspective: Content modeling that actually scales. Built a three-tier system: Concepts (foundational knowledge) → Deep Dives (series-based learning paths) → Systems (production case studies). Each concept tracks prerequisites, related topics, interview relevance by level (L5-L8), and links back to which deep dives use it. Zod validates everything at build time. This isn't a blog template - it's a knowledge graph with static output. Islands architecture delivers on its promise. React hydrates only for search (Fuse.js across all content types) and a few interactive bits. Rest is zero-JS HTML. Coming from years of Next.js, the bundle size difference is stark. Users on flaky mobile connections notice. Extensibility without framework lock-in. Wrote a custom Shiki transformer for ASCII diagram highlighting - ERROR renders red, FIX green, DECISION orange. Dynamic OG images generated at build via Satori+Resvg. No Lambda cold starts, no external services, just static assets. Infra cost: basically zero. View Transitions shipped before others figured it out. One import, smooth page transitions. Small detail, big UX lift. Where it gets tricky: Complex content relationships require multiple getCollection() calls and manual joins. Works fine, but a query builder would help for sites with heavy cross-linking. Also, the content layer is powerful but documentation assumes simpler use cases. Product observation: Astro found a real gap - content sites that need occasional interactivity but don't want SPA overhead. Most frameworks optimize for apps and retrofit content. Astro did the opposite and it shows. Curious how Cloudflare integration plays out. Edge rendering + this content model could be interesting for personalization without sacrificing static performance.

alexpadula 9mo ago

Awesome!

deleted 9mo ago

[deleted]

kjgkjhfkjf 9mo ago

Cloudflare's goal is to become the default choice for anyone deploying an app to the cloud. It makes sense for them to support popular frameworks such as Astro, so that they can ensure that the frameworks work very well on their Workers platform.

dzogchen 9mo ago
Anyone except users that need to serve the German market. Due to peering issues with the biggest German ISP that have been unresolved for years, websites hosted with Cloudflare simply don’t load in the evening.

guihubie 9mo ago

Astro is life!

lupefiasko 9mo ago

[dead]

jimmyl02 9mo ago

Astro is my favorite framework for static sites. It's hard to describe but it just "makes sense". You don't need complex build setups and you can get the best of all worlds with great SSG capabilities + can easily express things with React when needed for example. I wish there was another path to monetization besides joining a larger company but I'm happy that the team will get to continue building out an amazing framework!

dvcoolarun 9mo ago

Open source alone can’t sustain companies long-term. Eventually everyone needs a bigger, safer home.

ziemann 9mo ago

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tffarhad 9mo ago

Wow, amazing news. At Themefisher, we’ve built 40+ Astro templates used by hundreds of Astro devs and many client sites. Also great to hear it was Cloudflare!! Hope Astro keeps growing.

TeamCommet1 9mo ago

This was inevitable. We're seeing the "Vercel-ification" of the edge. For a long time, Cloudflare had the superior infrastructure (Workers, R2, KV), but lacked the cohesive "onramp" that Next.js provides for Vercel. By acquiring Astro, Cloudflare finally owns the full stack, from the local dev experience to the global edge delivery. The real question is whether Cloudflare can maintain Astro's "framework agnostic" soul while being incentivized to push everyone toward Workers/Pages.