So, cloudification: lock the customer into a complex cloud dependent solution they can't easily migrate to some other commodity infrastructure provider.
I essentially do a 1 click deployment for my personal site with Cloudflare.
I don't want to deal with the cloud infra for my personal site.
I could, I've done it in corporate, I've done it for my startup 2 years ago.
But I'm rusty, I don't know what the latest people are using for configuration, etc.
Because there is 1 click with CF or Vercel and I don't have to think about it—I don't.
If they increase their price it likely wouldn't be enough friction for me dust off the rust.
I think this is the relation.
I'm not locked in, it's just HTML pages, but I am through my own habit energy, tech changing, and what I want to put effort into, which is not infra and serving my site.
They can stay open source, but stop putting any effort into supporting deploying to cloudflare's competitors, including accepting PRs for such improvements.
Or they could add features that only work if you deploy via cloudflare.
I also take anything said in an acquisition announcement with a grain of salt. It is pretty common for companies to make changes they said they wouldn't a few years after an acquisition.
Vercel does not make Next.js hard to deploy elsewhere. Next.js runs fine on serverful platforms like Railway, Render, and Heroku. I have run a production Next.js SaaS on Railway for years with no issues.
What Vercel really did was make Next.js work well in serverless environments, which involves a lot of custom infrastructure [0]. Cloudflare wanted that same behavior on CF Workers, but Vercel never open-sourced how they do it, and that is not really their responsibility.
Next.js is not locked to Vercel. The friction shows up when trying to run it in a serverless model without building the same kind of platform Vercel has.
Can you describe what you mean here? Because I have heard this about 100 times and never understood what people mean when they say this. I am hosting a NextJS site without Vercel and I had no special consideration for it.
Did YOU even bother to look at their site? They support more than static generation, including SSR and even API endpoints. That means Astro has a server that can run server-side (or serverless) to do more than static site generation, so it's not just a static site generator either.
And yes I can see you're posting the same lie all over the comments here.
They can say whatever they want, and then do whatever they want. They have no contractual or legal obligation.
Almost every (it seems) acquisition begins with saying, 'nothing will change and the former management will stay on'. A year later, the former managment leaves and things change dramatically.
That's always been true. Perhaps even more so as Astro constantly faced an existential battle for a working business. Now they don't have to do that and Cloudflare makes their money on their infra business. Locking Astro up now or in the future gains them very little compared to how much they make with hosted upsell services. [edit: clarity]
It's a static site builder. It creates a static site. HTML, CSS, and JS. That you can then upload literally anywhere.
Once again, what lock in? There is literally nothing to lock in. Explain exactly how they are going to lock somebody in, moreso than the lazy "for now" which you seem to constantly repeat.
No? It's still the same Astro that you can move to any other provider that supports it - and it's just Javascript, so pretty much everyone supports it.
