Thread

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

641 points · 315 comments · speckx

yomismoaqui · 1785939907 · focus · HN ↗
Everytime I read about new things from Cloudflare they look really cool but I cannot shake the feeling of not wanting to use them for fear of lock-in, am I too paranoid?
1. kentonv · 1785941369 · focus · HN ↗
  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 top of our open source runtime.
  <a href="https://github.com/cloudflare/workerd" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/cloudflare/workerd
  1. yewenjie · 1785943614 · focus · HN ↗
    Does workerd have full feature-parity with Workers, including stuff like Durable Objects?
    kentonv · 1785944239 · focus · HN ↗
    It's the same code. The only thing it doesn't include is the global scheduling and orchestration, but you don't actually want that locally. (And honestly... that stuff is a bit of a beast.)
    Durable Objects are fully supported by workerd (and Cloudflare OS uses them extensively).
    There is, however, one catch currently: Durable Objects don't scale out well without the global scheduling. For running Cloudflare OS for one user, this is actually no big deal, but a company-wide instance might not work well.
    But I'm actually fixing that:
    <a href="https://github.com/cloudflare/workerd/pull/6780" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/cloudflare/workerd/pull/6780
    Unfortunately didn't get enough time to land it before this release, but it'll come soon.
    With that I would expect a self-hosted Cloudflare OS on your own cluster to work quite well.
    AgentME · 1785975342 · focus · HN ↗
    This is exciting! I've loved the idea of Durable Objects but I've disliked that there's no existing way to use them while scaling to multiple machines outside of Cloudflare.
    TheTaytay · 1786024580 · focus · HN ↗
    Thank you for coming in and replying to all of these comments with actionable, honest info!
  2. delduca · 1785947154 · focus · HN ↗
    Can I host outside Cloudflare?
    PUSH_AX · 1785951136 · focus · HN ↗
    No it uses cloudflare primitives
    kentonv · 1785952405 · focus · HN ↗
    Incorrect. You can host it on workerd on your own servers. No Cloudflare required.
    PUSH_AX · 1785953012 · focus · HN ↗
    Don’t the docs say running on wrangler is not for production use? Or am I missing something?
    kentonv · 1785953191 · focus · HN ↗
    wrangler is a development tool. You wouldn't want to run dev mode in production.
    But workerd can be used directly without wrangler, and is production-capable in that format.
    Unfortunately we did not have time to put together example configs for this before launch (I wish we could have delayed, it was out of my hands), but we will be doing so soon.
    Mentioned in the readme here:
    <a href="https://github.com/cloudflare/cloudflare-os#deploy-to-your-own-server-using-workerd" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/cloudflare/cloudflare-os#deploy-to-your-o...
    PUSH_AX · 1785953854 · focus · HN ↗
    Appreciate the correction, thank you
  3. vavos · 1785948225 · focus · HN ↗
    It's cool that it's open-source, but how much effort and scale would it take to run it on non cloud flare infra?
    tstrimple · 1785969214 · focus · HN ↗
    ffs there is literally no pleasing some people. "Hosting an open source project is too difficult! They should provide a free SaaS solution instead on their own cost but also no lock-in!!"
    Rapzid · 1785977667 · focus · HN ↗
    High switching costs is a form of lock-in "open source" or not.. This is something people with real experience making real decisions are well aware of..
    tyre · 1785980099 · focus · HN ↗
    I think it’s a legitimate question! Some companies operate at such a scale that if you tried to adopt their tools or services, it would be way too complex for the ROI.
    Think Bazel or how K8s was for ~ever. For Google’s scale? Required. For a small team? A net-negative.
    kentonv · 1785982065 · focus · HN ↗
    workerd stand-alone is designed to work well at small-medium scale.
    If we open sourced Cloudflare's production scheduler, nobody would be able to use it because it is explicitly designed for HUGE, globe-spanning scale. Well, nobody except our direct competitors.
    But the goal with workerd is actually that it should be pretty easy to run, about as easy as Node. Stateless workloads should scale trivially (just add more instances and load balance). For Durable Objects (statefull), currently it doesn't scale well at all, but I'm working on changes[0] so that it scales nicely across a cluster. I intentionally chose a design here that is operationally easy to set up. (Basically: just connect all the nodes to NFSv4.)
    [0] <a href="https://github.com/cloudflare/workerd/pull/6780" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/cloudflare/workerd/pull/6780
    potamic · 1786001805 · focus · HN ↗
    Adopting a new technology often needs a lot of consideration. People will have a lot of questions, want to understand the implications and discuss with the hive mind. No need to attack them for that, I think.
    elicash · 1786025678 · focus · HN ↗
    I think tstrimple incorrectly thought it was a rhetorical question really meant to complain.
    But my interpretation was like yours, that it was good faith and a literal question.
    csomar · 1786020343 · focus · HN ↗
    Open Source is a marketing term if your solution takes $2m worth of compute or devops time in order to run properly. The idea is, you have a way out if you want to leave. An option. But if leaving costs $x,xxx,xxx then that option was never there for most people. One example is NextJS. It's open source but even CloudFlare couldn't figure out how to run it properly on their platform.
    kentonv · 1786032159 · focus · HN ↗
    It does not cost $2m of compute to run an instance of Cloudflare OS. I am running it on a random server in my basement.
    AlotOfReading · 1786044265 · focus · HN ↗
    Another year or two of RAM shortages should go a long way to closing that gap.
  4. EGreg · 1786022451 · focus · HN ↗
    Kenton, back when I was building qbix.com/ecosystem you were building sandstorm, and I wanted to get in touch.
    Now I have spent about 6 months building the hardened, self-hosted AI version that can be hosted in different clouds like AWS and GCP, and you shipped yours.
    I think we’d have a lot to discuss. Should I reach out on gmail?

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