sungrokshim (u/sungrokshim)

sungrokshim commented on Show HN: Porter Cloud – PaaS with an eject button · Posted by u/sungrokshim

danpalmer · 2 years ago

I love GCP (did a migration to it at my last place), but I think like all cloud providers, it's a lot more "some assembly required" than Porter looks like, or like Heroku used to be back in the day.

To my knowledge GCP doesn't have a git-push deployment. Cloud Run might be the closest thing if you do a Docker push, but that is just one part, then you need a database, still need CI/CD, etc.

It's close. And while I like the look of Porter, I probably wouldn't bother and would jump straight to GCP, but I do think there are usability differences.

sungrokshim · 2 years ago

OP here. Cloud Run actually does have a git-push deployment and is pretty easy to use. This is why I preemptively added this bit in the post:

> [1] By “big three clouds” we mean the lower-level primitives of each cloud provider. We don’t mean their higher level offerings like AWS App Runner, Google Cloud Run, or Azure App Service, since those run into the same PaaS problems described above.

Porter is explicitly designed to be a competitor to these services that is 1) more flexible 2) cloud-agnostic 3) more cost-effective. Many of our users come from Cloud Run because they need to customize networking settings (timeouts, websockets, etc.) or autoscaling behavior, not to mention the rather expensive cost (taking as an example a machine with 2 vCPU and 4GB RAM, Cloud Run is around 3~4x the cost of what equivalent compute would cost as a VM).

sungrokshim commented on Show HN: Porter Cloud – PaaS with an eject button · Posted by u/sungrokshim

meiraleal · 2 years ago

That's definitely not the same situation. Porter's advantage would be pricing but GCP, AWS and Azure give away thousands of USD for startups to start so it's even cheaper than Porter to start.

sungrokshim · 2 years ago

For startups with credits, we offer this deal so you can pair up Porter with your cloud credits: https://porter.run/for-seed-stage-startups.

We also offer a feature called one-click SOC2 compliance that configures your AWS account to pass controls on platforms like Vanta/Drata in a single click, which many startups find useful.

sungrokshim 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.

sungrokshim · 2 years ago

As long as the cloud providers of the world keep inevitably converging to, often against their own will, a single standard for each piece of the infrastructure (e.g. k8s, postgres, S3), most things that you deploy on the cloud will remain portable. You are never truly locked-in.

Similarly, if you want to, you can move away even from a PaaS that is explicitly designed to lock you in to another cloud provider. And as I mentioned in the post, this is exactly what we've done for countless companies that wanted to move from a PaaS to the big 3 cloud providers.

The more important question is: what is the switching cost? Why do companies so rarely switch hosting providers and if they do, why does it take months and sometimes years for them to move?

We want the process of moving from Porter Cloud to one of the hyperscalers as arbitrary as a click of a button.

sungrokshim commented on Show HN: Porter Cloud – PaaS with an eject button · Posted by u/sungrokshim

adenta · 2 years ago

talk to me about GPU’s? I saw some gpu_node config stuff in your documentation a couple days ago.

If Porter can host GPU’s, that’s a superpower render.com doesn’t have.

sungrokshim · 2 years ago

We support GPUs if you use standard Porter on any of the three cloud providers. Also coming soon to Porter Cloud.

sungrokshim commented on Show HN: Porter Cloud – PaaS with an eject button · Posted by u/sungrokshim

davedx · 2 years ago

Pricing page (developers). How can you have less than 1 CPU?

sungrokshim · 2 years ago

You can adjust resources down to 0.01 vCPU and 1MB RAM granularity. Price is prorated accordingly

sungrokshim commented on Show HN: Porter Cloud – PaaS with an eject button · Posted by u/sungrokshim

neeleshs · 2 years ago

Cool concept. In my experience, the biggest headache/expense is data migration, and not software migration. As long as the stack is vendor neutral, it's not the long-poll, though it is gruntwork.

In the SaaS world, maybe this will be useful to run managed cloud services? (That is, customer A wants a private instance in AWS and customer B wants it in Azure)

sungrokshim · 2 years ago

Yes data migration is definitely the most gnarly part. We regularly migrate databases with zero downtime using Bucardo (we detail it here: https://www.porter.run/blog/migrating-postgres-from-heroku-t...) and will be addressing this part of the migration in the ejection process in the future as well.

sungrokshim commented on Show HN: Porter Cloud – PaaS with an eject button · Posted by u/sungrokshim

davedx · 2 years ago

It's a great idea, but the pricing seems high - $30/month minimum? I'm running 3 apps on Fly.io and I'm still so low in the pricing that they're invoicing me $0. I will pay for the convenience of a PaaS - but not that much.

sungrokshim · 2 years ago

not sure where you saw $30/month minimum! There's no minimum spend on Porter, and you just pay for what you use as low as a 0.1 CPU and 1MB RAM. We do not have a free tier however.

sungrokshim commented on Show HN: Porter Cloud – PaaS with an eject button · Posted by u/sungrokshim

hahahacorn · 2 years ago

We migrated from Heroku to Porter at work (at my behest). Still one of the better bets I’ve taken.

There is definitely still some more devops overhead compared to Heroku, and I wish the product was a bit more mature. But even at ~$18k/mo on Heroku spend we’re now spending less than half with Porter. Other than myself and the other engineer who were responsible for the migration, the rest of the team really got to keep their work flows and there was little impact except for swapping some tools.

We had a messy, poorly documented web of micro services and shit too, the Porter team made the migration surprisingly easy all things considered. I’ll work with them again if I ever scale past a $10k/mo Heroku bill (post enterprise contract) with another team.

sungrokshim · 2 years ago

Great to hear that!

> I’ll work with them again if I ever scale past a $10k/mo Heroku bill (post enterprise contract) with another team.

We built Porter Cloud so you can just start on us from day 1 and migrate to the Porter you're used to when you're ready, without spending much effort on the migration :)

sungrokshim commented on Show HN: Porter Cloud – PaaS with an eject button · Posted by u/sungrokshim

theturtletalks · 2 years ago

They charge for managing the kubernetes instance that’s running on your infrastructure. What’s cool is that you can stop using Porter once everything on AWS/Azure/GCP is set-up and you’re not locked in. You just have to manage the cluster yourself.

sungrokshim · 2 years ago

yup exactly. we also offer volume discounts on Porter as you scale so the cost grows logarithmically as opposed to exponentially. Our philosophy is that we should win on merit not inertia. If the customer doesn't continue to see value, you can offboard and start managing devops on your own.