Another 'run anywhere' promise that actually runs...somewhere else.

Cloudflare has open-sourced 'workerd,' the runtime engine behind its Workers serverless platform. The announcement positions it as a way to run Workers code anywhere, but developers quickly discovered it's more of a stripped-down, vendor-locked engine than a true portable runtime. Key Cloudflare platform services like KV, D1, R2, and Durable Objects aren't included; they're just bindings that require you to rebuild the underlying infrastructure yourself.

For engineers hoping to escape vendor lock-in, this is a classic bait-and-switch. The runtime comes with hard limits mirroring Cloudflare's own network constraints, like a 15-minute alarm cap and only a subset of Node.js compatibility. The real message is that your code can 'run anywhere' only if you're willing to rebuild half of Cloudflare's proprietary platform yourself. It's less about portability and more about extending the vendor's ecosystem under the guise of openness.