porter VS rancher

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.

Did something happen to the Apache 2 rancher? https://github.com/rancher/rancher/blob/v2.7.5/LICENSE RKE2 is similarly Apache 2: https://github.com/rancher/rke2/blob/v1.26.7%2Brke2r1/LICENS...

I follow the 4 ABCD steps bellow, but the first pod deployment never ends. What's wrong in it? Logs and result screens are at the end. Detailed configuration can be found here.

CVE-2023-22651 is rated 9.9/10 : https://github.com/rancher/rancher/security/advisories/GHSA-6m9f-pj6w-w87g

Depends. When I came into my last company I immediately noticed the lack of reproducible environments. Brought this up a few times and was met with some resistance because "we didn't have the capacity"... Until prod went down and it took us 23 hours to bring it back up due to spaghetti terraform.

For the latest releases of rancher: https://github.com/rancher/rancher/releases When is Rancher 2.7.1 going to be released? The Rancher support matrix for 2.7.1 shows k8s v1.24.6 as the highest supported version and Azure will drop AKS v1.24 in a few months... Should this be a concern for us? What could happen if we create our cluster with Rancher for an unsupported K8s version? 1.25 for example. - Rancher 2.7.2 just got released including support for 1.25. I have however tested running unsupported versions before, unless there is major deprecations in the kubernetes API it is fine in my experience. If we move to AKS imported clusters, in case we add node pools, and upgrade the cluster, will those changes be reflected in the Rancher Platform? - Yep! If we face some issues by running an unsupported K8s version on Rancher Launched K8s clusters, is it possible to remove it from Rancher, do the stuff we need, and then import it into the platform? - Yes, however be careful and do testing before doing in prod. From top of mind: Remove cluster from rancher (if imported), if rancher created you might want to revoke ranchers SA key for the cluster first (so it can't remove it). Delete the cattle-system namespace, and any other cattle-* namespaces you don't want to keep. And do your thing. It looks like AKS is faster than Rancher regarding supported Kubernetes versions... We would like to know if Rancher will always be on track with AKS regarding the removal of K8s version support and new versions. - In my experience yes. (Been using rancher on all three clouds for a 4 years now). What are exactly the big differences between imported AKS and Rancher-launched AKS? What should we look at, and what issues can we face when using one or another? - The main difference is that rancher will not be able to upgrade the cluster for you. You will have to do that yourself.

variable "rancher" { type = object({ namespace = string version = string branch = string chart_set = list(object({ name = string value = string })) }) default = { namespace = "cattle-system" # There is a bug with destroying the cloud credentials in version 2.6.9 until 2.7.1 and will be fixed in next release 2.7.2. # See https://github.com/rancher/rancher/issues/39300 version = "2.7.0" branch = "stable" chart_set = [ { name = "replicas" value = 3 }, { name = "ingress.ingressClassName" value = "nginx-external" }, { name = "ingress.tls.source" value = "rancher" }, # There is a bug with the uninstallation of Rancher due to missing priorityClassName of rancher-webhook # The priorityClassName need to be set # See https://github.com/rancher/rancher/issues/40935 { name = "priorityClassName" value = "system-node-critical" } ] } description = "Rancher Helm chart properties." }

When I searched DuckDuckGo instead, the 12th link actually had the real answer. It's in this issue on Rancher's GitHub. Turns out the Rancher admin needs to be in all of the Keycloak groups they want to have show up in the auto-populated picklist in Rancher. Being a Keycloak admin and even creating the groups isn't good enough. Frustratingly, the "caveat" note the Rancher guy is pointing to that says this is only present in the guide to setting up Keycloak for SAML, but apparently this is also true for OIDC.

Explicitly set TLS 1.3 in Rancher, though it could be a bug in Rancher: https://github.com/rancher/rancher/issues/35654

Thanks. Yeah looks like this might work: https://github.com/rancher/rancher/releases/tag/v2.7.2-rc3