Web Development: Cloudflare Acquires Astro Technology Company
The company behind the Astro web framework now belongs to Cloudflare. However, Astro is set to remain open source and actively developed.
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Astro Technology Company has been acquired by Cloudflare, as announced by the Astro team on their blog. The usage of the Astro web framework, which has been around since 2021, is said to be doubling every year, with download numbers currently around one million per week. The acquisition by Cloudflare now makes more resources available. Cloudflare had already been a sponsor of the open-source project for a considerable time.
Impact of the Acquisition
The blog post describes what will change and what will remain the same due to the acquisition. Astro will continue to be open source and MIT-licensed and will be actively further developed. It can still handle a wide range of deployment targets besides Cloudflare, and the open governance and current roadmap will also remain in place. However, all full-time employees of The Astro Technology Company are now employees of Cloudflare but are expected to continue working on the Astro framework full-time.
A similar development was recently observed with Bun: The JavaScript toolkit was acquired by the US-based AI company Anthropic. Like Astro, Bun is intended to remain open source and MIT-licensed despite the commercial acquisition.
Focus on Astro Development: Planned Features in v6
Instead of trying to build a successful business model themselves as before, the Astro team can now fully dedicate themselves to the development of the web framework, according to the blog post. This is expected to be noticeable in the upcoming Astro 6.0 release, the first beta version of which is now ready.
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The beta for Astro 6.0 presents a redesign of the development server astro dev, particularly regarding Cloudflare Workers: astro dev can now run a complete application with Cloudflare's open-source JavaScript runtime workerd. This is the same runtime that Cloudflare Workers use in production -- unlike the previous Astro-Cloudflare integration, which used a simulation.
In addition, the release brings new integrated APIs, including for the use of the security standard Content Security Policy (CSP), and is expected to show significantly increased rendering performance.
(mai)
