porter VS porter

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.

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