OpenWorkers

Infrastructure

self-hosted serverless runtime

SHOW HN2026

500points
158comments
#50of 4,366 in 2026
Top 2%of 2026 by points

How HN took it

CuriousMostly questions and neutral comments

15 positive, 32 neutral or asking, 1 mixed, 12 critical, out of 60 comments about the project. Thread score +0.04.

Idea: 7 for, 7 againstDocs: 0 for, 3 againstPrivacy: 1 for, 1 againstExecution: 1 for, 1 against

The thread, comment by comment

Each row is a top-level comment and its replies, in HN's order. Select a cell to open that comment on HN.

positive neutral or mixed critical about another commenter or something else the maker

What HN said

What people liked

  • Architecture is technically excellent and a good product idea

    From 1 comment
    • Technically, and architecturally this is excellent. It’s also an excellent product idea. And I’m particularly a fan of the big-ass-vendor-inversion-model where instead of the big…
      keepamovin on HN
  • Good escape hatch from Cloudflare lock-in

    From 2 comments
    • Cool. I always liked CF workers but haven’t shipped anything serious with it due to not wanting vendor lock-in. This is perfect for knowing you always got a escape hatch.
      victorbjorklund on HN
    • Good to see this! Cloudflare's cool, but those locked-in things (KV, D1, etc.) always made it hard to switch. Offering open-source alternatives is always good, but maintainign…
      orliesaurus on HN

Objections

  • Self-hosting undercuts the edge computing benefit of many points of presence

    From 2 comments
    • > It brings the power of edge computing to your own infrastructure. I like the idea of self-hosting, but it seems fairly strongly opposed to the concept of edge computing. The…
      bob1029 on HN
    • I am always interested in seeing alternatives in the edge compute space but self hosting does not make sense to me. The benefit of edge is the availability close to customers.…
      brainless on HN
  • Sandbox security guarantees are unproven for untrusted code

    From 1 comment
    • The problem with sandboxing solutions is that they have to provide very solid guarantees that code can't escape the sandbox, which is really difficult to do. Any time I'm…
      simonw on HN
  • Unclear why it beats running Node or Deno in a container

    From 2 comments
    • Why would I want this over just sticking Node / Deno / Bun in a Docker container?
      theknarf on HN
    • Cool project, but I never found the cloudflare DX desirable compared to self hosted alternatives. A plain old node server in a docker container was much easier to manage, use and…
      strangescript on HN

Requests

  • Kubernetes deployment guide

    From 1 comment
    • Could you add a kubernetes deployment quick-start? Just a simple deployment.yaml is enough.
      kachapopopow on HN
  • GitHub auto-deploy on push

    From 1 comment
    • This is very nice! Do you plan to hook this up to GitHub, so that a push of worker code (and maybe a yaml describing the environment & resources) will result in a redeploy?
      st3fan on HN
  • Publish a roadmap of unimplemented features

    From 1 comment
    • Perhaps it might be helpful to some to also lay out the things that don't work today (or eg roadmap of what's being worked on that doesn't currently work?). Anyway, looks very…
      indigodaddy on HN
  • Add a license

    From 1 comment

Questions

  • How does it differ from workerd?

    From 1 comment
    • Cool project, great work! Forgive the uninformed questions, but given that `workerd` (https://github.com/cloudflare/workerd) is "open-source" (in terms of the runtime itself,…
      tbrockman on HN
  • Does it use the actual Cloudflare runtime?

    From 1 comment
    • Does this actually use the cloudflare worker runtime or is this just a way to run code in v8 isolates?
      vmg12 on HN
  • What is the failure model when user code misbehaves?

    From 1 comment
    • Nice project. 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…
      IntelliAvatar on HN
  • Does it need Node.js?

    From 1 comment
    • I've decided to ditch CF because Wrangler is deployed via NPM and I cannot bear NodeJS and Microsoft NPM anymore. I get the impression this can't be run without NodeJS right now?
      willtemperley on HN

Alternatives named

  • Cloudflare Workers

    From 2 comments
    • Cool project, great work! Forgive the uninformed questions, but given that `workerd` (https://github.com/cloudflare/workerd) is "open-source" (in terms of the runtime itself,…
      tbrockman on HN
    • Probably worth pointing out that the Cloudflare Workers runtime is already open source: https://github.com/cloudflare/workerd
      rozenmd on HN
  • workerd

    From 2 comments
    • Cool project, great work! Forgive the uninformed questions, but given that `workerd` (https://github.com/cloudflare/workerd) is "open-source" (in terms of the runtime itself,…
      tbrockman on HN
    • Probably worth pointing out that the Cloudflare Workers runtime is already open source: https://github.com/cloudflare/workerd
      rozenmd on HN
  • Deno

    From 1 comment
    • Any reason to abandon Deno? edit: if the idea was to have compatibility with cloudflare workers, workers can run deno https://docs.deno.com/examples/cloudflare_workers_tutorial/
      nextaccountic on HN
  • OpenFaaS

    From 1 comment
  • Rivet actors

    From 1 comment
    • This is similar to what rivet (1) does, perhaps focusing more on stateless than rivet does (1) https://www.rivet.dev/docs/actors/
      dangoodmanUT on HN

Category, keywords, summaries and labels on this page were made by AI (Thread Reader v2) and not checked by hand. Each point links to the comments it came from.

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