Thread

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

658 points · 326 comments · speckx

rozenmd · 1785939425 · focus · HN ↗
I liked Kenton's take on this: <a href="https://x.com/KentonVarda/status/2084990137180590572?s=20" rel="nofollow">https://x.com/KentonVarda/status/2084990137180590572?s=20
Text from tweet:
Today we are releasing Cloudflare OS, a chatbot with connectors, just like every other tech company is doing.
Except actually, it's different. This is a remake of Sandstorm[.]io, my startup from 10 years ago, except this time built on Cloudflare Workers (the platform I've spent the last 9 years building) and deeply leveraging AI. This is more or less the culmination of my secret 10-year master plan.
This is a full-on personal app vibe coding platform, in which the sandbox is so secure that you can pretty much go wild -- the AI cannot introduce a significant security bug. We believe a company's security team can feel comfortable giving non-technical users permission to vibe code and then sleep soundly at night.
How is that possible? It's the Sandstorm security model, revisited. A "Gadget" is the same thing as a Sandstorm "Grain": a fine-grained app instance. For example, if you have a document editor app, each document runs as a separate instance of the app, in a separate sandbox (one "Gadget").
This means two things, both of which I think are Big Deals: 1. The platform can manage all access control, by controlling who can access the Gadget at all. There is no way the Gadget can accidentally leak itself to an attacker -- even an attacker who has access to other Gadgets based on the same app. 2. Since everyone is running their own copy of the code, everyone can freely modify their copy of the code.
Think about #2 a bit more.
What if, when you wanted a new feature in the software you are using, you could just prompt your agent to add it?
This doesn't work in the cloud Software-as-a-Service model, because you are not running your own copy of the app.
Sandstorm tried to change that 10 years ago, but the world wasn't ready, because not enough people had the skills or patience to actually modify their software. AI has changed that. Now you just ask the agent -- the same agent that you are using to help you interact with the Gadget can also modify the code of the Gadget.
And it is so fun.
1. mosura · 1785940224 · focus · HN ↗
  Sandstorm without self hosting has no interest though. (Edit: see below, where the creator states it _can_ be run locally)
  Buzz looks like a more reasonable direction than this does.
  1. hobofan · 1785940512 · focus · HN ↗
    Yes, just like SaaS was a limitation to it's utility, PaaS is still a limitation, just on a different level.
  2. kentonv · 1785940816 · focus · HN ↗
    What do you mean? This is 100% open source and self-hostable!
    <a href="https://github.com/cloudflare/cloudflare-os" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/cloudflare/cloudflare-os
    It runs on the open source Workers Runtime:
    <a href="https://github.com/cloudflare/workerd" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/cloudflare/workerd
    You can run it at home if you want. There's even a Home Assistant Gatekeeper.
    mosura · 1785941429 · focus · HN ↗
    So you can run it off the public internet with no sneaky external dependency on cloudflare, slack etc?
    And it would be functionally the same? With the same performance if you put enough hardware there?
    If so cool, and that should have been clearly in the announcement, because as it sounded it is “I am a sucker, lock me in!”
    kentonv · 1785941598 · focus · HN ↗
    > So you can run it off the public internet with no sneaky external dependency on cloudflare, slack etc?
    Yes. It even supports ollama and works decently well with some local LLMs.
    > And it would be functionally the same? With the same performance if you put enough hardware there?
    Honestly it is faster running locally.
    > If so cool, and that should have been clearly in the announcement,
    We had so many things we wanted to say, it was hard to fit them all into one story.
    The blog post is for an enterprise audience. My tweet thread is for the hacker audience.
    mosura · 1785942580 · focus · HN ↗
    That is actually cool.
    Maybe it is my bubble, but the experience people are having with Anthropic particularly is motivating a big “get this stuff back under control” effort so while it may not be strategically optimal for Cloudflare the local hosting would prove more valuable to enterprises than maybe a few years back, even if presented as a backup plan.
    edaemon · 1785943297 · focus · HN ↗
    Neat! How does that work with the AI Gateway portion? I see some references in the code but at a quick glance I can't tell if you can configure it to skip AI Gateway.
    kentonv · 1785943727 · focus · HN ↗
    Use of Cloudflare AI Gateway is optional.
    In the default configuration, you just plop your Anthropic/OpenAI/Gemini/Workers AI/ollama API keys into the UI and it talks to each provider directly.
    That said, I would recommend AI Gateway, it has a lot of nice features. :)
    upcoming-sesame · 1785945280 · focus · HN ↗
    You're not alone The name "cloudflare-os" by itself made me think this was heavily based on Cloudflare
    nolist_policy · 1785942813 · focus · HN ↗
    Do you have a store/list of public blueprints like sandstorm?
    kentonv · 1785943000 · focus · HN ↗
    Not yet, but that's an obvious direction to take things. :)
    I'm really excited by the idea that this platform makes it safe to use blueprints that someone else vibe coded, without worrying about whether they checked it for security bugs, etc. Basically if the app works, it works. So yeah, there absolutely should be a marketplace so everyone can try everyone else's stuff.
    BTW there are three blueprints installed automatically (docs, slides, sheets).
    runtime_terror · 1785946063 · focus · HN ↗
    Couldn't the blueprint exfiltrate incoming data to an external location for example?
    ocdtrekkie · 1785946674 · focus · HN ↗
    Blueprints shouldn't (if I know anything about Kenton) have access to the Internet/external locations without you granting it permission to.
    kentonv · 1785947641 · focus · HN ↗
    The blueprint is just code, it does not include data or capabilities.
    It's, I suppose, possible that the agent added secrets to the code itself. Not, like, API keys -- the agent never sees those. But it could have extracted sensitive info and put it into code, perhaps?
    We can implement restrictions on exporting blueprints from workspaces that have seen sensitive secrets, though this might be more annoying than useful. It's a tricky balance.
    mlrtime · 1786013868 · focus · HN ↗
    Another request for Home lab geeks: A Proxmox installer script.
    I tried going through the wizard to install, it would be nice if there was a proxmox container or vm to spin up quickly and test rather than npm or cloudflare account (which requires a $5/month workers plan).
    andersonpico · 1785946860 · focus · HN ↗
    Thank you for your work over the years, sandstorm is a really interesting and inspiring piece of software. I'll certainly try to self-host CloudflareOS.
    blehn · 1785980291 · focus · HN ↗
    I'd say better to not call it Cloudflare in that case
    kentonv · 1785981223 · focus · HN ↗
    The idea is actually supposed to be that Cloudflare OS is Cloudflare's internal instance, but when you deploy it for your own company, you call it "<your company> OS".
    The product name and logo are configurable in the admin settings.
    Yeah it's a little cheesy. Sorry.
  3. benatkin · 1785943485 · focus · HN ↗
    There is also qm with smol machines. I found this out the long way, by looking at the contributors to qm at <a href="https://github.com/yc-software/qm" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/yc-software/qm where I found BinSquare, the founder of smol machines. Then I found a tweet about a public instance of it where I could try out having it code something agentically - I'm in the replies here: <a href="https://x.com/binsquares/status/2083305704274976819" rel="nofollow">https://x.com/binsquares/status/2083305704274976819
    I guess the lock-in is to Cloudflare Workers, which is limited to JavaScript. I would in fact look into projects that are built around MicroVMs and WebAssembly. It seems Buzz would be happy to use smolmachines, or whatever. You'd have to roll your own permission system, but smolmachines would at least take care of being able to use stuff within an app, by offering persistent, portable containers.
    Actually I think now I can finally say why this sandstorm.io with Cloudflare OS has lock-in. The promise is "you can pretty much go wild" and that you can hand it off to non-technical people to do that. Much as you squint, there is not a sophisticated access control system available to self-hosted users. There's a framework for building a sophisticated access control system, but that isn't the same as having something open source that you can self-host and let non technical users go wild.
    However, this is cool. I just agree with you that Buzz sounds more interesting to me as someone who was into Sandstorm.
    runtime_terror · 1785946144 · focus · HN ↗
    Workers also supports Python, Rust and anything via WebAssembly (Go, C, etc)
    benatkin · 1785955051 · focus · HN ↗
    Ah, that changes the amount of work and the reward in the equation for attempting to self-host Cloudflare OS. And I knew that I could run WebAssembly manually inside of JavaScript, but it seems to be runnable directly too. What would help me to know further is how Cloudflare OS integrates its access control in that open source project, and if it is conveniently available to WebAssembly, Python, or Rust workers.

Open on Hacker News to reply ↗

Unofficial Hacker News client; not affiliated with Y Combinator.