January 16, 2026
Clouds, islands, and spicy threads
Astro is joining Cloudflare
Astro joins Cloudflare: builders celebrate while skeptics squint
TLDR: Astro’s team is joining Cloudflare while promising to stay open-source and run anywhere, with Astro 6 on the way. The community split between excitement for speed and support, and worry about future lock-in—plus a side of nerdy memes and a Hacker News thread hijack.
Astro—the web framework famous for super-fast, content-first sites—is moving in with Cloudflare, and the internet immediately grabbed popcorn. Fans cheered the promise that Astro stays open source (MIT license), keeps its “build anywhere” vibe, and ships Astro 6 soon. Cloudflare says it’s all about making the web faster, and devs loved hearing the team will keep working on Astro. The official blog dropped, and a Hacker News thread promptly exploded—so much so that users noted the conversation actually migrated to a different post, because of course it did (link).
But the spicy side of the comments? A chorus of “open-source honeymoon or corporate lock-in later” skepticism. Some asked if “deploy anywhere” will quietly turn into “deploy best on Cloudflare.” Others shrugged, saying the Astronauts have already been building on Cloudflare’s stack—so why not make it official. The mention of a redesigned dev server powered by Vite (a fast dev tool) got applause from speed freaks, while meme-makers joked about “Cloudflare-flavored islands” (a nod to Astro’s “Islands Architecture,” where only parts of a page are interactive). Meta-drama also ruled: commenters cracked up that the main debate moved to the other thread, because internet discourse can’t resist a duplicate-post showdown.
Key Points
- •Cloudflare is joining forces with the Astro team; all full-time Astro employees have become Cloudflare employees.
- •Astro remains open source under the MIT license, with public roadmap and open governance.
- •Astro 6 public beta is available, featuring a redesigned development server powered by Vite; GA is expected in the coming weeks.
- •Cloudflare and partners (Webflow, Netlify, Wix, Sentry, Stainless) will continue supporting open-source via the Astro Ecosystem Fund.
- •Astro’s Islands Architecture enables fast static HTML with client islands and supports frameworks like React, Vue, Svelte, and Solid; Astro can be deployed to any cloud or platform.