porter VS rack

Hi HN, this is Trevor and Justin from Porter (https://porter.run). We first launched on HN almost 3 years ago with our original product, which deploys your applications to your own AWS, Azure, or GCP account with the simple experience of a PaaS. (original launch post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26993421).

We’re excited to show you something new - we’ve built Porter Cloud (https://porter.run/porter-cloud), a hosted Platform as a Service (PaaS) that you can eject from. It works just like conventional PaaS’s that deploys your apps with a few clicks, but it lets you eject to your own AWS, Azure, or GCP account as you scale.

Since launching Porter in 2021, we helped migrate a lot of companies from a PaaS to AWS, Azure, and GCP. Most of these companies had gotten started on these platforms in the early days to optimize for speed and ease of use, but ultimately had to go through a painful migration to one of the big three cloud providers as they scaled and outgrew the original platform.

Interestingly, we learned that many startups that deploy on a PaaS are fully aware that they’ll have to migrate to the big three clouds at some point. Yet they choose to deploy on a PaaS anyway because outgrowing a cloud platform is a champagne problem when they're focused on getting something off the ground. This, however, becomes a very real problem when you start running into technical constraints and it is difficult to migrate your production environment while serving users.

We’ve built Porter Cloud so you can deploy the earliest versions of the product as quickly as possible, with a peace of mind that you can eject to the tried and true hyperscalers later. When you need to eject, you can follow a few simple steps to migrate your workloads to AWS, Azure, or Google Cloud with minimal downtime.

If you’re curious how it works, please drop your questions below. And if you’ve ever dealt with a migration from a PaaS to one of the big three cloud providers, we’d love to hear about your experience in the comments. Looking forward to it!

Yep, we're backed by YC in the W24 batch - this is evident on our landing page [1].

We're both second time CTOs and we've been on both sides of this, as consumers of and creators of OSS. I was previously a co-founder and CTO of Porter [2], which had an open-core model. There are two risks that most companies think about in the open core model:

1. Big companies using your platform without contributing back in some way or buying a license. I think this is less of a risk, because these organizations are incentivized to buy a support license to help with maintenance, upgrades, and since we sit on a critical path, with uptime.

2. Hyperscalers folding your product in to their offering [3]. This is a bigger risk but is also a bit of a "champagne problem".

Note that smaller companies/individual developers are who we'd like to enable, not crowd out. If people would like to use our cloud offering because it reduces the headache for them, they should do so. If they just want to run our service and manage their own PostgreSQL, they should have the option to do that too.

Based on all of this, here's where we land on things:

1. Everything we've built so far has been 100% MIT licensed. We'd like to keep it that way and make money off of Hatchet Cloud. We'll likely roll out a separate enterprise support agreement for self hosting.

2. Our cloud version isn't going to run a different core engine or API server than our open source version. We'll write interfaces for all plugins to our servers and engines, so even if we have something super specific to how we've chosen to do things on the cloud version, we'll expose the options to write your own plugins on the engine and server.

3. We'd like to make self-hosting as easy to use as our cloud version. We don't want our self-hosted offering to be a second-class citizen.

Would love to hear everyone's thoughts on this.

[1] https://hatchet.run

[2] https://github.com/porter-dev/porter

[3] https://www.elastic.co/blog/why-license-change-aws

Co-founder of Porter (https://porter.run) here - Porter is a platform that brings that easy PaaS experience to a k8s cluster that's running in your own cloud account (and manages it for you so you don't have to).

We are offering a credit program for early stage startups that you can apply for here, happy to fast track your application! https://porter.run/for-seed-stage-startups

Co-founder of Porter (https://porter.run) here - we do not use Terraform under the hood. We moved away from an IaC based system earlier this year to better manage our users' infrastructure distributed across multiple cloud accounts. A decision that definitely turned out to be conveniently prescient :)

With this new system, we are also able to immediately reconcile drifts that occur in our user's infrastructure, which an IaC based system did not allow us to do.

Aptible hosts (and pays for) AWS resources on your behalf, similar to Heroku/Render/Railway. Last year, we built support for integrating Aptible into your own AWS account, but only a handful of existing customers are currently using that, and it's not available in the product by default. I'd be interested to learn why you prefer this model. If you're willing to chat about it, my email is in my profile.

Alternatively, have you checked out other PaaS-in-your-own-IaaS solutions like:

- https://porter.run/

- https://www.flightcontrol.dev/

- https://coolify.io/ (OSS, not managed)

These might not meet all your needs, and I think they're all relatively new.

Porter (YC S20) | Full Time | Full-Stack Engineer | NYC or Remote | https://porter.run

Hey HN, I'm Alexander, co-founder of Porter. We're building Heroku in your own cloud - we let users link up their own AWS/GCP, point to the code they want to run, and then put the rest of the hosting process on autopilot (CI/CD, SSL, autoscaling, zero downtime deploys, infra monitoring, etc).

We're hiring NYC-based or remote engineers that are passionate about building tools for developers. As we're a fast-growing seed-stage startup, you should be comfortable with regularly shifting priorities and iterating at a very high (daily) velocity.

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

If you'd like to take a look at our codebase, we're open source - check it out at https://github.com/porter-dev/porter.

Open positions:

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

- Full-stack Engineer: https://www.workatastartup.com/jobs/43716

Please apply by sending an email to jobs [at] porter [dot] run or applying through https://www.workatastartup.com/jobs/43716.

https://porter.run is managed kubernetes on your own cloud with all the scaling built in. In theory, you could run this on your own cloud provider, and stay entirely within EU

How does this compare against https://porter.run/ ?

Honestly you should checkout open source + self-host alternatives like porter (https://github.com/porter-dev/porter). I tried it in a project before and the developer experience was surprisingly good.

I would encourage anyone looking at porter that needs more flexibility, a deeper feature set, a more extensive cli, and/or flatter pricing structure to check out convox [https://convox.com]. I've been using it for years on top of EKS and have been able to defer hiring a dedicated dev ops person.

n8n is a  powerful workflow automation tool that every business can use to work more efficiently. However, self-hosting this solution in an efficient infrastructure platform like Convox is the only way to explore the full potential of n8n’s capabilities. With this tutorial, you should have a step-by-step practical guide showing you how to do this.

In that case, there’s a need for more efficient methods for hosting PHP apps from the local machine directly to the production environment. Using a modern and user-friendly Platform as a Service (PaaS) solution like Convox helps you easily deploy and manage PHP applications on all infrastructures, including AWS, Google Cloud, Azure, and DigitalOcean.

Convox is one of the best PaaS platforms for growing businesses that do not yet have the resources and capacity to handle a large team of DevOps engineers. The platform offers a perfect solution for companies that manage multiple client projects with a limited number of DevOps engineers onboard.

I don't really have the resources to re-architect my application to use Lambda, Fargate, etc. so I just want to find some quick wins within the current constraints. I use Convox.com, which uses Terraform to spin up and manage the EKS cluster. (They provide a CLI and web UI similar to Heroku on top of AWS EKS.) It works really well most of the time and makes it really easy to achieve HIPAA compliance, etc. So I'm pretty happy with it, but I need help understanding it and optimizing it. We can easily tweak the underlying Terraform config to make any changes to the infrastructure.

If you’ve read this far but actually haven’t managed to get started with Kubernetes, this is the toughest part of the process - but don’t worry, we have you covered. The good news is that Convox (a PaaS solution for Kubernetes-based deployments) can help you get started with Kubernetes in just a few clicks.

Convox for example offers your organization direct Kubernetes access and removes the complexity of managing and operating your Kubernetes cluster directly. Furthermore, Convox is a multi-cloud product that is compatible with several cloud service providers including DigitalOcean, AWS, Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure. It is free to start simplifying your application development process with Convox and it only takes a few clicks to get started.

This case study lifts the hood on one such development team that has had to adapt its PaaS choices with time. We will discuss the teams’ journey towards automating its infrastructure and deployment process through a series of migrations - from Digital Ocean to Heroku, to Convox. This rare insider’s perspective mirrors the processes, problems and solutions faced by similar teams along the journey, drawing lessons and teachable moments for software development team managers.

Instead of manually configuring Kubernetes yourself for app development and deployment, you can use Convox. The Convox platform is designed to simplify your infrastructure management tasks. With Convox, you and your team can smoothly deploy, scale, and manage applications effortlessly, exploiting the power of Kubernetes, without the headaches.