00:00:00Astro is joining Cloudflare, so if you're keeping track at home, this now means that Cloudflare has Astro,
00:00:05Vercel has Next.js but also Nuxt and Svelte, Google has Angular, Microsoft have Blazor,
00:00:10and everybody gets a framework. In all honesty though, this news does seem like a good thing,
00:00:14so let's just jump right in, talk about what this news is and what this means for Astro going forward.
00:00:19I'll start with a quick recap of what Astro is for those of you that might not know.
00:00:28Astro is an open-source web framework but not a UI one, this is sometimes misunderstood,
00:00:33and you can actually still use React, Vue, Svelte or Solid with Astro. What Astro provides as its
00:00:38main selling point is making it incredibly easy to build content-driven sites like blogs,
00:00:42documentation or e-commerce and making those sites incredibly performant. And its main way of doing
00:00:48that is rendering the site on the server and sending static HTML to the client with the least amount of
00:00:53JavaScript needed so the initial load is very fast especially when compared to some of the other
00:00:58options. Now there's obviously loads more to Astro than just that and in fact we've covered a few of
00:01:03the features on this channel so subscribe for more great content like this and it's also worth noting
00:01:07Astro can handle more complexity with its island architecture that help popularize but the main
00:01:12thing that you need to know for this story is it makes content-driven sites very fast and that's
00:01:16why companies like Google, OpenAI and of course Cloudflare use it for things like their blog posts,
00:01:21their marketing pages and their documentation. Even me too, I use it personally for my blog which
00:01:26I haven't updated in years but that is definitely not Astro's fault. So with that bit of context then
00:01:31we're at this blog post from the founder of Astro announcing that they're joining Cloudflare and I'll
00:01:36just start out with the important bits for those of you that use Astro or want to in the future
00:01:40and that is the key promises in this announcement. The first one is that it will stay open source and
00:01:45actively maintained. The second is that it will continue to support other deployment options not
00:01:49just Cloudflare so hopefully there's no feelings of vendor lock-in like many people feel with Next.js
00:01:54but Vercel does try and deny and also the open governance and roadmap are going to stay the exact
00:01:59same with the entire team over at Astro now working at Cloudflare full-time on Astro. So that's pretty
00:02:05good news for everyone over there which I am very happy to see. But why join Cloudflare then? Well
00:02:10the answer to that is pretty similar to some of the other stories that we've heard recently. While
00:02:14Astro is an MIT licensed open source web framework it's backed by the Astro technology company which
00:02:21is VC backed aka it needs to make some money. Now the original idea was that Astro would sit at the
00:02:27center of a massive developer platform with optional hosted primitives like database storage analytics
00:02:32all designed in lockstep with the framework. As Fred says attempts to introduce paid hosted primitives
00:02:38into the ecosystem fell flat and rarely justified their own existence. Nothing clicked with the users
00:02:44the same way that Astro did and in fact we've seen similar stories to this with other projects
00:02:49like Tailwind and BUN where they perform really well as an open source tool but not so much as
00:02:54a company. Astro has actually been doubling in downloads every year and it's now at nearly a
00:02:58million per week but I imagine that revenue probably wasn't as successful. So that answers why Astro was
00:03:04probably looking for a new place to keep up with the maintenance cost of Astro but why Cloudflare
00:03:09and what do Cloudflare want with Astro? Well they actually realized they'd been working towards the
00:03:14same goal from different angles. Cloudflare has always been about solving the fast web problem
00:03:18from the infrastructure side of things and Astro has been trying to solve it from the framework side
00:03:23and now together they can do both. Plus Cloudflare was already a long time sponsor of Astro even using
00:03:29it themselves for their documentation, their workers landing page and a bunch of their marketing sites
00:03:33so the team over there is already very familiar with it so it's not just an opportunity to buy
00:03:38a framework they actually like the goal of Astro and want it to thrive and I also like Cloudflare
00:03:43as a host for Astro as they do have a decent track record. They sponsor projects like Honno and
00:03:49Tanstack and they haven't tried to lock them down onto only that platform so I think they have some
00:03:53good precedent for keeping things nice and open. And finally in Cloudflare's blog post we also get
00:03:58another reason why they might be interested in Astro and that is because they've already seen
00:04:02a trend of Astro and Cloudflare being used together in the new world of AI. There's tools like Webflow
00:04:08Cloud, Wixvibe and Stainless that all use Cloudflare and Astro together demonstrating that it's a good
00:04:12fit for both of them and there's a demand for this synergy of Astro and Cloudflare so it really does
00:04:18seem like it's going to be a great home for Astro and going forward Astro doesn't have to worry about
00:04:23where they're making their money from they can fully focus on making Astro the best web framework
00:04:28for content driven websites and in fact Astro 6 just hit beta which looks really cool so subscribe
00:04:33for when we have a video on that and that's really all there is to this news. I am very excited to see
00:04:38what's coming from Astro now that they can fully focus on it. Let me know what you think in the comments
00:04:42below, why they're subscribed and as always see you in the next one.