Thread

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

641 points · 315 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. 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

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