Why is CloudFlare doing this?
MMaximilian Schwarzmüller
Computing/SoftwareBusiness NewsInternet Technology
Transcript
00:00:00Vite has been acquired by Cloudflare or to be precise,
00:00:05the Vite team or the company behind it,
00:00:07White Zero is joining Cloudflare.
00:00:10And as a web developer, it's worth a closer look
00:00:14because obviously Vite is a super important tool,
00:00:18the main build tool and so much more
00:00:22in modern JavaScript and TypeScript projects.
00:00:25And of course, the big question therefore is,
00:00:27why is this happening and what does it mean?
00:00:29For web developers?
00:00:31And I guess that's two questions actually,
00:00:33but let's take a closer look.
00:00:34Now, first things first, there are three blog posts.
00:00:38I'll link them all below, which talk about this change
00:00:41and all three of them make it very clear
00:00:43that Vite remains open source under the MIT license,
00:00:47that it will stay vendor agnostic.
00:00:50So you will be able to deploy your Vite applications,
00:00:53not just on Cloudflare in the future,
00:00:55but instead just right now and in the past,
00:00:58just on a multitude of providers.
00:01:01And of course, also just on the VPS if you want to.
00:01:04And the development of Vite will still be controlled
00:01:07by the Vite team.
00:01:08They will follow their existing roadmap and so on.
00:01:12Now, I'm 100% sure that it will stay open source.
00:01:15And about the vendor agnostic part,
00:01:18I have absolutely no doubts about that.
00:01:20For the roadmap, I'm pretty sure it will stay pretty
00:01:26cloudflare independent, but I would guess
00:01:29that it will be influenced by cloudflare to some degree,
00:01:32because of course, if somebody's paying your bills,
00:01:36you will want to align with their requirements.
00:01:39That being said, I'm sure it will not be cloudflare exclusive,
00:01:43and there will be many things on that roadmap
00:01:45that will align with broader interest.
00:01:47I'm just mentioning this here because we also had Bun joining Anthropic,
00:01:53so Bun being acquired by Anthropic at the end of last year.
00:01:56And of course, we had pretty much the same message there, you could say.
00:01:59It also still is open source and MIT licensed.
00:02:03And you can absolutely still use Bun for whatever you used it before.
00:02:07And it still is an amazing JavaScript and TypeScript runtime.
00:02:10No doubts about that.
00:02:12But if you look at the features that have been shipped to Bun over the last months,
00:02:18for example, the Bun WebView or the Bun Image API,
00:02:23it, of course, kind of seems like these are features
00:02:27that make sense for a tool that's used by coding agents
00:02:32and that even runs a coding agent, namely ClaudeCode.
00:02:36So I would expect that with Vite, we also see a tool that stays amazing,
00:02:43that can be used for all kinds of projects that you can run on any provider.
00:02:47But I would imagine that some parts of the future roadmap
00:02:52will particularly help you with building Cloudflare applications
00:02:57if that makes sense.
00:02:58But at the same time, many of the things that may make it easier to build and ship
00:03:04Cloudflare applications may also make it easier to ship web applications with other providers.
00:03:09So that's not really negative.
00:03:11It's just something to be aware of, I would say, or something I think I, of course, don't know.
00:03:15But why exactly is this happening?
00:03:17And what exactly is that void zero thing in case you missed it?
00:03:21Well, as mentioned, void zero is a company set up by Avenue, the creator of Vite, the creator of Vue.js,
00:03:29too, by the way.
00:03:30And in case you wonder, Vue.js is not part of this deal.
00:03:34It's not part of void zero.
00:03:36The Vue.js team now is pretty much independent of Avenue, is my understanding, at least.
00:03:44So for many, many years, Vue hasn't been a one man show anymore.
00:03:49So Vue.js is absolutely not related to that.
00:03:52But void zero is a company that was set up, I think, in 2022 or 2023 and received venture capital funding.
00:04:00And they built build tools.
00:04:01They built many amazing build tools.
00:04:04They built Oxlint, for example, an amazing alternative to ESLint.
00:04:08They also built Ox FMT, Oxformat, an amazing formatter, all super fast, built with rust under the hood.
00:04:15They also built Rolldown, Rust-powered JavaScript and TypeScript bundler.
00:04:22And all these tools are part of that void zero company and are used or usable via Vite under the hood.
00:04:30And they built that to build a comprehensive ecosystem of tools that make your life as a developer easier
00:04:36and faster so that building JavaScript applications is more fun and faster and so on.
00:04:41That is void zero.
00:04:42So a company that builds these build tools.
00:04:45Now, how does such a company earn money?
00:04:47That exactly is the big problem.
00:04:50As mentioned, they are venture capital funded or were venture capital funded.
00:04:55And obviously, therefore, they need to earn some money at some point.
00:04:59And I guess even if they weren't, everybody needs to make a living.
00:05:02So at the end of last year, in October 2025, they announced Vite Plus.
00:05:08And the idea was to have like one tool, like a supercharged Vite.
00:05:13Vite, of course, is free to use.
00:05:15Vite Plus, that was the idea, would not be free to use.
00:05:18Instead, it would simply be one tool that has all that linting, formatting, testing stuff built in
00:05:24and makes it particularly easy to use.
00:05:26Of course, you could set it up all on your own, too, in a normal Vite project.
00:05:30You could add Vtest for testing, aux format, aux lint and wire it up all manually.
00:05:35And the idea behind Vite Plus was that it would make that all a bit easier, would come with all
00:05:39these things built in and be more interesting for companies, therefore, that want a standardized,
00:05:45best practice enabled setup.
00:05:48But of course, yeah, charging money for something which you can also relatively easy set up on your
00:05:54own, probably not the best idea or simply not an idea that earns you tons of money or that's very
00:06:01hard to monetize, at least.
00:06:03That's why then later they announced Void.
00:06:06And Void, you could say, was a framework built on top of Vite, a framework that would make it far
00:06:12easier to build complete full stack applications.
00:06:15And most importantly, also deploy them to Cloudflare.
00:06:19It would essentially be like a service built on top of Cloudflare where you wouldn't have to worry
00:06:26about provisioning or setting up all the Cloudflare infrastructure under the hood.
00:06:30Instead, you could build your full stack application and then run a command and it would then set up
00:06:36the Cloudflare resources for you.
00:06:38So it would make building full stack applications and deploying them easier.
00:06:42That was the idea behind the Void framework.
00:06:45And the idea was that you could use it with all these different front ends.
00:06:49So it would not be view specific or react specific.
00:06:53But instead, the main kicker would be that it's easy to deploy it,
00:06:56that all these resources are set up for you.
00:06:59And you can already see the connection there, right?
00:07:01It would use Cloudflare under the hood.
00:07:04Back then, the idea still was to do that as a product, though, not as part of Cloudflare.
00:07:11But it, I guess, made a lot of sense to then take the next step and actually join Cloudflare.
00:07:17And that is what happened now.
00:07:19And the idea here is that Cloudflare is moving quickly towards becoming an infrastructure
00:07:31provider, a hosting provider that makes it particularly easy to build AI-built applications.
00:07:39So, you know, you've got all these AI agents going around.
00:07:41You've got all these wipe-coded apps or these agentic-engineered apps.
00:07:45And many of these web apps then, at some point, need to be deployed.
00:07:50And many of them need features like queues or databases or file systems, file storage.
00:07:55And Cloudflare offers all these services.
00:07:58But in the past, and to some degree still right now, you have to wire up all the stuff manually.
00:08:04So you need some understanding of which products Cloudflare offers, how they connect, how they work.
00:08:11And the mission of Cloudflare, and not just Cloudflare, by the way, but also of many other
00:08:16hosting providers nowadays, is to give you that simplified deployment experience, also that
00:08:22agent-ready deployment experience, where you got an agent build a web application for you,
00:08:29probably with your input or maybe also entirely wipe-coded.
00:08:32And then you give the agent also a CLI, which is very agent-friendly to use, got a lot of
00:08:38explanations in there, which the agent can then use to quickly deploy it to the cloud.
00:08:43Cloudflare wants to become a provider for these kinds of applications.
00:08:48And they plan on building it all on top of Vite.
00:08:51So in the official Cloudflare blog post, they talk a bit more about this mission.
00:08:57They also show some impressive numbers about their Vite plugin, which existed before that deal,
00:09:02which saw rapid adoption this year, because AI agents use Vite.
00:09:07It's the established standard JavaScript ecosystem build tool, bundler, whatever you want to call it.
00:09:13And Cloudflare is pretty popular amongst agents already.
00:09:17So they got pretty strong adoption for that Vite plugin, and they now want to take that to the next level.
00:09:22And they want to build a new CLI, Cloudflare CLI, which should become a superset of Vite, so built on top of Vite.
00:09:33So that your agents, of course, also you, but the main idea is your agents, can use that tool to quickly build full stack applications and then also easily deploy them.
00:09:45And all these resources are provisioned for you behind the scenes.
00:09:48So kind of going back to the vision of the void framework, but now agent first and fully integrated with Cloudflare,
00:09:56with the official Cloudflare support, also monetary support, of course.
00:10:00And that is what's going to happen there.
00:10:03Now, the good news, of course, for us developers is that the features that already make Vite great,
00:10:10all these different tools I mentioned before for formatting linting and Vite itself and its extensibility and so on,
00:10:16that all benefits this vision, this Cloudflare future vision too.
00:10:21And therefore, as mentioned initially, I have no doubt that it will stay open,
00:10:25that you will be able to use it with other vendors, also because there is no way around Vite basically right now,
00:10:32especially since these agents have these strong opinions on which tools they want to use by default,
00:10:37which especially matters for wipe-coded apps, of course.
00:10:40And therefore, I believe we'll only see more hosting providers pushing towards that
00:10:47agent first easy deployment vision, and they will probably also embrace Vite for that,
00:10:54or at least the chances are pretty high for that, I would say.
00:10:57But of course, Cloudflare now got kind of priority access, you could say.
00:11:01And of course, also as mentioned initially, they can influence the roadmap a bit to make sure
00:11:07that this own CLI that they're building, this Cloudflare CLI, which I mentioned,
00:11:13that this really works well together with Vite under the hood, so to say.
00:11:18Anyways, that's the plan there. That are some interesting changes. And I also want to make it very clear,
00:11:25not just that I have no doubts about Vite staying open source and so on. And I don't see that as a
00:11:32negative thing at all. Instead, it's crucial that open source maintainers can make a living off that,
00:11:39earn money and continue working on the tools we use every day. And that's not something to frown on or to
00:11:46see as a bad thing or as a sellout or anything like that. Because ultimately, like you and me, everybody
00:11:52needs to make money. And therefore, I think it's great to see popular projects being backed or acquired
00:12:00by companies, even if they then influence their development a bit. As long as it's not totally
00:12:06shifting away from being a flexible open ecosystem, which I don't see happening, I think that is a great
00:12:12development. But of course, as always, let me know what you think about this deal.
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