kots VS porter

KOTS (by Replicated, mentioned already)

Check out https://kots.io/

We have helped clients several industries and sectors where these words either mean different things, or people who use them are thinking of different things. An appliance has meant a physical thing before it has also meant a VM.

The question you have asked includes a solution. Many client meetings start with that. This is what's called an XY problem[0], where the client says they want want Y, but that's their implementation of a solution to solve X. That may or may not be the only solution, but finding out the actual problem to be solved has never hurt me and saved a lot of time and money.

This is why we spend time defining the problem and stripping away every ounce of jargon we can, because that jargon can create a bias towards a solution that may not be optimal. For example, site-to-site VPN. Why? Gateway ? Why ? These are solutions. What's the job to be done.

Anyway... Have a look at https://www.replicated.com/ and https://kots.io/

0: https://github.com/replicatedhq/kots/pull/511

This is just a concept. AFAIK only one implemented this concept is Microsoft's project porter: https://github.com/getporter/porter

For porter I am talking about this project https://porter.run/ and NOT this https://porter.sh/

Porter

As far as I know the tool is used at least in Microsoft. The classic use case is where you want to install an application and also define the infrastructure as well (i.e cluster + db + lb + app). You can see the examples here https://github.com/getporter/porter/tree/main/examples

Check https://cnab.io/ and https://porter.sh/

I'm closely tracking an effort by Microsoft that aims to do a lot of what you're describing since I find myself bridging between these tools and deploying stacks that span tools and roles. [CNAB](https://cnab.io/) and the front-running implementation, [Porter](https://porter.sh/), enable one-step infra deployments, packaged as a single OCI-compatible container, with any number of steps, using the best tools for each of those steps. Think of using aws-cli for some initialization step (create or verify presence of a state bucket), applying some terraform to create infra, and finishing with a helm chart to complete deployment of app components. Each stage in a bundle packages not only the code to run it but also the execution binary of the tool that runs it. The spec and porter are still a moving target but it's a promising space and a nice adjacent evolution of the current state of tooling.

Cool, it's great to know that it isn't abandoned.

I'm not sure why you'd say that their business model was a success. They were bought by Microsoft for Azure. I guess I wonder if a PaaS company can survive without getting the profits off renting the machines to people. Amazon, Google, and Microsoft all have PaaS options based around the idea that it comes bundled with the compute, not as a standalone open-source thing for you to use on any platform.

I guess the question is whether Porter's business plan is "make enough that a company that owns a cloud wants to buy us". Oracle could probably use a nice PaaS platform and team. Maybe DigitalOcean would like to beef up their PaaS offering by acqui-hiring a team with proven knowledge.

Poking around https://deislabs.io, it's interesting to see that they have a project called "Porter" which seems to be unrelated to the "Porter" being launched here: https://porter.sh. They aren't quite the same, but they both have "easily run your app" goals.

There is already this from Microsoft https://github.com/getporter/porter