I like the idea of self-hosting, but it seems fairly strongly opposed to the concept of edge computing. The edge is only made possible by big ass vendors like Cloudflare. Your own infrastructure is very unlikely to have 300+ points of presence on the global web. You can replicate this with a heterogeneous fleet of smaller and more "ethical" vendors, but also with a lot more effort and downside risk.

Any time I'm evaluating a sandbox that's what I want to see: evidence that it's been robustly tested against all manner of potential attacks, accompanied by detailed documentation to help me understand how it protects against them.

This level of documentation is rare! I'm not sure I can point to an example that feels good to me.

So the next thing I look for is evidence that the solution is being used in production by a company large enough to have a dedicated security team maintaining it, and with real money on the line for if the system breaks.

Forgive the uninformed questions, but given that `workerd` (https://github.com/cloudflare/workerd) is "open-source" (in terms of the runtime itself, less so the deployment model), is the main distinction here that OpenWorkers provides a complete environment? Any notable differences between the respective runtimes themselves? Is the intention to ever provide a managed offering for scalability/enterprise features, or primarily focus on enabling self-hosting for DIYers?

Cloud services are actually really nice and convenient if you were to ignore the eye watering cost versus DIY.

These kinds of text-based diagrams are appealing for us techies, but in the end I learned that they are less practical. My suggestion is to use an image, and think of the text-based version as the "source code" which you keep, meanwile what gets published is the output of "compiling" it into something that is for sure always viewable without mistake (that one is where we tend to miss it with ascii-art).

I get the impression this can't be run without NodeJS right now?

The isolation model here is interesting. For agents that need to handle untrusted input (processing user URLs, parsing arbitrary documents), V8 isolates give you a security boundary that's much lighter than full container isolation. But you trade off the ability to do things like spawn subprocesses or access the filesystem.

Curious about the persistence story. Most agent workflows need some form of state between invocations - conversation history, task progress, cached auth tokens. Is there a built-in KV store or does this expect external storage?

I see we have entered that phase in the ebb and flow of cloud vs. self-hosting. I'm seeing lots of echoes of this everywhere, epitomised by talks like this:

https://youtu.be/tWz4Eqh9USc

I have been thinking exactly about this. CF Workers are nice but the vendor lock-in is a massive issue mid to long term. Bringing D1 makes a lot of sense for web apps via libSql (SQLite with read/write replicas).

Do you intended to work with the current wrangler file format? Does this currently work with Hono.js with the cloudflare connector>

edit: if the idea was to have compatibility with cloudflare workers, workers can run deno https://docs.deno.com/examples/cloudflare_workers_tutorial/

The benefit of edge is the availability close to customers. Unless I run many servers, it is simply easier to run one server instead of "edge".

One thing Cloudflare Workers gets right is strong execution isolation. When self-hosting, what’s the failure model if user code misbehaves? Is there any runtime-level guardrail or tracing for side-effects?

Asking because execution is usually where things go sideways.

Recently really enjoying CloudFlare Workflows (used it in https://mafia-arena.com) and would be nice to build Workflows on top of this too.

(1) https://www.rivet.dev/docs/actors/

I'm quite ignorant on the topic (as I never saw the appeal of Cloudflare workers, not due to technical problems but solely because of centralization) but what does DX in "goal has always been the same: run JavaScript on your own servers, with the same DX as Cloudflare Workers but without vendor lock-in." mean? Looks like a runtime or environment but looking at https://github.com/drzo/workerd I also don't see it.

Anyway if the "DX" is a kind of runtime, in which actual contexts is it better than the incumbents, e.g. Node, or the newer ones e.g. Deno or Zig or even more broadly WASI?