Readit News logoReadit News
jusrhee commented on Show HN: Porter Cloud – PaaS with an eject button    · Posted by u/sungrokshim
scottmessinger · 2 years ago
Thanks! Followup question: After you "eject" the app and start paying AWS directly but continue using porter, is the experience more like the archived repo? Or, is it still Porter Cloud just with different billing underneath?
jusrhee · 2 years ago
The experience after ejecting to your own AWS account is the same as Porter Cloud. If you're using something like Postgres on Porter Cloud that also gets switched to wrap RDS under the hood in the AWS case
jusrhee commented on Show HN: Porter Cloud – PaaS with an eject button    · Posted by u/sungrokshim
latchkey · 2 years ago
I personally don't get it. You can start on GCP today, without being tied to GCP much at all. It isn't even expensive to do so. Is there something I'm missing here?

Cloud Functions are just a http handler with no hard dependencies on GCP.

Cloud Tasks are just a handler and the tasks just hit your Cloud Functions.

Cloud SQL is just postgres.

You connect your github with actions that CI/CD auto deploy to the above.

If you do it that way, you're pretty much dependency free and can move anywhere else if you need to.

jusrhee · 2 years ago
Cloud providers (particularly the hyperscalers) are ultimately bundles of multiple services. Given that the hyperscalers do almost everything, you could extend this point in a variety of ways: why do companies already on AWS bother to use MongoDB, Snowflake, or even GitHub when DynamoDB, Redshift, and CodeCommit exist?

The answer tends to boil down to a combination of developer experience, performance, and pricing. Fwiw the actual platform offerings on GCP are also more intuitive than the equivalent services on AWS + Azure where most businesses/startups are hosting services

Edit: cloud vendor lock-in is also a very real phenomenon regardless of how much it just "looks like" all cloud providers should be easily interchangeable. Needless to say, the incentives when you make money selling compute are to keep people on your stuff

jusrhee commented on Show HN: Porter Cloud – PaaS with an eject button    · Posted by u/sungrokshim
scottmessinger · 2 years ago
Very cool! As someone pointed out, your github repo says it was archived: https://github.com/porter-dev/porter-archive Naively, I would think Porter cloud would just be a managed version of your porter-dev/porter-archive. Could you talk about how it's a different product than before? Did the code base change significantly?
jusrhee · 2 years ago
Our archived repo functioned as more of a Kubernetes-centered dashboard - Porter Cloud is intended to offer a more complete PaaS experience including spinning up non-application resources like databases
jusrhee commented on Show HN: Porter Cloud – PaaS with an eject button    · Posted by u/sungrokshim
kiney · 2 years ago
Any plans to support eject to on-prem or bare metal hosters like Hetzner?
jusrhee · 2 years ago
At the moment we only support the major hyperscalers since they're the most common ejection destinations, but we're considering adding more options. No concrete plans for this at the moment though
jusrhee commented on Show HN: Porter Cloud – PaaS with an eject button    · Posted by u/sungrokshim
mushufasa · 2 years ago
To wit, I ask because:

1. key to a buying decision: I see the documentation for Eject and it looks good, though like any product you'll only able to support it over time if it makes business sense for you

2. I'm interested in this challenge generally cross-industry for companies that sell 'get off the ground' services to startups, on a high margin usage-based model. It's a business model with a constant sword of Damocles, because if your customers do well they would have to leave.

AFAIK the only real solutions

- technical lock-in, either by making it concretely hard or "soft" hard (introduce a whole training regime for employees based on your systems with idiosyncratic concepts and terminologies, so the human skills aren't transferrable)

- build out a kitchen sink featureset including niche products specific to enterprises (a lot of GRC stuff), so they'll keep paying you high margins at scale (this is AWS's journey.)

- invest/take equity in your customers (this is only a partial solution but if they leave at least you'll capture some upside. See: Peak6/Apex & Robinhood)

- capping your fees to a flat upper rate (this will destroy your own expected customer LTV though you keep the customer)

- lock-in long multiyear contracts (this is also a partial solution)

- become an IP troll (e.g. oracle badgering it's legacy customers)

- deliver revenue or addressable markets to your customers that they wouldn't otherwise be able to get (no iOS developers choose it *because of* Xcode or Swift; it's the marketplace)

jusrhee · 2 years ago
I'd like to reframe this a bit (Porter co-founder btw). The way we see it, the core value of many PaaS solutions is the reduction of DevOps overhead by allowing teams to focus engineering resources on product and not generic infra maintenance tasks.

Most of our existing users are companies that are already using Porter in their own AWS/GCP/Azure because they want to reduce time spent on cloud management as they continue to grow. Companies like Heroku exclusively provide this service in a hosted cloud environment where they also resell the underlying infrastructure to you (similar to Porter Cloud), but we want to be flexible in delivering the same value on any cloud provider.

If we're doing our job, we will continue to automate enough generic DevOps work where Porter is delivering value even as you scale in your own cloud. We have a good number of late-stage startups (and even some public companies) that have DevOps teams in place using us precisely this way to handle core parts of their infra and application lifecycle management.

Porter Cloud is intended as a way to "get off the ground," but our staying value lies in continuing to reduce the same DevOps overhead even once you're running in your own cloud account

jusrhee commented on Show HN: Porter Cloud – PaaS with an eject button    · Posted by u/sungrokshim
pil0u · 2 years ago
Hey thanks for sharing.

You mention 3x cheaper than Heroku, but the pricing page specifies $10 per month GB RAM, $20 per month vCPU.

I'm having a hard time to compare with Heroku with that information. Also, what about Postgres hosting?

jusrhee · 2 years ago
Founder here - the "up to 3x cheaper than Heroku" depends on the exact compute profile, but as a point of reference, Heroku pricing starts at $250/mo for a single 2.5 GB RAM instance on their Performance tier (https://www.heroku.com/dynos). Generously assuming that you get 2 dedicated vCPU cores, the equivalent Porter cost is ~3-4x cheaper

Edit: Porter Cloud also supports Postgres and our in-your-own-cloud offering just uses RDS under the hood for AWS

jusrhee commented on Ask HN: Who is hiring? (March 2023)    · Posted by u/whoishiring
jusrhee · 3 years ago
Porter (YC S20) | Full Time | NYC - Onsite | https://porter.run

We're building a PaaS that runs in a user's own cloud (basically Heroku on k8s). We've converted some of Heroku's largest enterprise users as well as a large base of high-growth startups despite starting just a little over a year and a half ago.

We're still a team of six but we believe in 10x engineers and are looking to grow our in-person team in NYC.

Tech stack: Go, Typescript/React, Kubernetes, AWS

Open positions:

- Product Engineer: https://www.workatastartup.com/jobs/46166

- Backend Engineer (Go): https://www.workatastartup.com/jobs/44501

- Kubernetes Engineer: https://www.workatastartup.com/jobs/45970

Please apply through https://www.workatastartup.com/companies/porter

jusrhee commented on Ask HN: Who is hiring? (February 2023)    · Posted by u/whoishiring
jusrhee · 3 years ago
Porter (YC S20) | Full Time | NYC - Onsite | https://porter.run

We're building a PaaS that runs in a user's own cloud (basically Heroku on k8s). We've converted some of Heroku's largest enterprise users as well as a large base of high-growth startups despite starting just a little over a year and a half ago.

We're still a team of only six people but we believe in 10x engineers and are looking to grow our in-person team in NYC.

Tech stack: Go, Typescript, React, Kubernetes, AWS

Open positions:

- Product Engineer: https://www.workatastartup.com/jobs/46166

- Backend Engineer (Go): https://www.workatastartup.com/jobs/44501

- Kubernetes Engineer: https://www.workatastartup.com/jobs/45970

Please apply through https://www.workatastartup.com/companies/porter.

u/jusrhee

KarmaCake day177January 24, 2017View Original