January 1, 2026
Edge-lord showdown
OpenWorkers: Self-Hosted Cloudflare Workers in Rust
Run edge apps at home — fans cheer, skeptics worry about the sandbox
TLDR: OpenWorkers lets you run Cloudflare-like apps on your own servers with a simple setup and safety limits. Commenters are split between excitement over ditching cloud lock-in and demands for hard proof the sandbox can’t be broken, plus questions about true compatibility and what’s missing today.
OpenWorkers just dropped a DIY way to run “Cloudflare-style” mini apps on your own servers, promising Cloudflare Workers vibes without the monthly bill. It’s open source Rust with JavaScript tucked into V8 “safe boxes” (timed and memory-limited), plus simple setup with Docker and Postgres, KV storage, a database, S3-like files, and cron jobs. The demo even looks CF-compatible, returning JSON from a little fetch handler. Cue the community split.
On one side, the anti–vendor-lock-in crowd is throwing confetti, cheering a future where your edge apps live at home instead of in the cloud. On the other, security hawks are sounding alarms: sandboxing needs bulletproof proof, not vibes. The loudest ask: show real tests, docs, and attack modeling — don’t just say “V8 isolates” and call it a day. There’s also identity confusion: is this truly Cloudflare’s runtime or a lookalike on V8? Meanwhile, pragmatic folks want a roadmap of what doesn’t work yet before they YOLO their infra, and the ops crowd dropped comparisons to OpenFaaS while self-hosters meme about escaping “NAT fees” and cloud markups.
The vibe: DIY cloud is back, but the comment section demands receipts. Git repo? Here you go: openworkers/openworkers-infra
Key Points
- •OpenWorkers is an open-source, Rust-based runtime that runs untrusted JavaScript in V8 isolates for self-hosted edge-style computing.
- •It supports KV storage, PostgreSQL, S3/R2-compatible object storage, service bindings, and environment variables/secrets.
- •The runtime is compatible with Cloudflare Workers syntax and includes cron scheduling with 5- or 6-field formats.
- •Resource isolation per worker is enforced at 100 ms CPU time and 128 MB memory.
- •Deployment is simplified via a single PostgreSQL database and a Docker Compose setup, with a provided infrastructure repository.