Cloudflare announced Friday it will acquire the Astro Technology Company team, which is responsible for the open source JavaScript web framework Astro.Astro is used by major brands like IKEA, Unilever, Visa and OpenAI to build fast, content-driven websites.The Astro team will join Cloudflare as employees. Astro itself will remain open source, to ensure its long-term growth and development, Cloudflare announced in a press release about the Astro acquisition.Search engines prioritize fast-loading and clean pages, the Cloudflare statement noted. Websites that rely heavily on JavaScript for initial rendering often struggle to deliver the required speed, which hinders search rankings and customer conversions.Pages on Astro serve up only the code needed to display a page in a browser. That’s in part because of its Island architecture, which it introduced in 2021. Astro’s Islands allow developers to create “islands” of interactive client-side components, while most of the page is generated statically in HTML. Server Islands extend the same architecture to the server.Astro is also UI-agnostic, meaning that while it has its own independent engine, it allows developers to bring in components from React, Svelte, Vue and other frameworks.This makes Astro a preferred choice for building high-performance, content-driven websites optimized for speed, according to Cloudflare.Investing in Open Source ToolsAstro’s former CTO, Fred Schott joined Brendan Irvine-Broque, Cloudflare senior product manager, in writing a post on Cloudflare’s blog about the news. In it, they noted that platforms built on Cloudflare, such as Webflow Cloud and Wax Vibe, use Astro to power the websites that customers build and deploy on their own platforms.Schott is now a Cloudflare senior engineering manager for its Emerging Technologies and Incubation (ETI) department.“Over the past few years, we’ve seen an incredibly diverse range of developers and companies use Astro to build for the web,” Schott and Irvine-Broque wrote Friday. “At Cloudflare, we use Astro, too — for our developer docs, website, landing pages and more.”Schott and Irvine-Broque added that the acquisition will allow the team to “double down” on making Astro the best framework for content-driven websites.“Protecting and investing in open source tools is critical to the health of a functioning, free and open internet,” Matthew Prince, co-founder and CEO of Cloudflare, said in his company’s statement about the acquisition. “By acquiring this talented team and committing to one of the most impactful frameworks when it comes to speed and performance, we’re going to ensure Astro continues to be the best web framework for content-driven websites, not only as it is today but for years to come.”For Astro’s part, Schott wrote that the Astro team will be able to accelerate the framework’s development and deliver a much larger scale.The post Cloudflare Acquires Team Behind Open Source Framework Astro appeared first on The New Stack.