porter VS Zulip

There's Porter, the "Kubernetes powered PaaS that runs in your own cloud".

https://github.com/porter-dev/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.

Zulip — Real-time chat with a unique email-like threading model. The free plan includes 10,000 messages of search history and File storage up to 5 GB. also, it provides a self-hostable open-source version.

(1) Zulip Chat - https://zulip.com/ - seems to be reasonably popular, but more people should know about it

I’ve been using it for over 5 years now [1], and it’s as good as ever. It’s way faster than any other chat app I’ve used. It has a good UI and conversation model. It has a simple and functional API that lets me curl threads and write blog posts based on them.

(only problem is that I Ctrl-+ in my browser to make the font bigger – I think it’s too dense for most people)

(2) re2c regex to state machine compiler - https://re2c.org

A gem from the 90’s, which people have done a great job maintaining and improving (getting Go and Rust target support in the last few years). I started using it in 2016, and used for a new program a few months ago. I came to the conclusion that it should have been built into C, because C has shitty string processing – and Ken Thompson both invented C AND brought regular languages to computing !!

In comparison, treesitter lexers are very low level, fiddly, and error prone. I recently saw dozens of ad hoc fixes to the tree-sitter-bash lexer, which is unsurprising if you look at the structure of the code (manually crawling through backslashes and braces in C).

https://github.com/tree-sitter/tree-sitter-bash/blob/master/...

These fixes are definitely appreciated, but I think it indicates a problem with the model itself.

(based on https://lobste.rs/s/endspx/software_you_are_thankful_for#c_y...)

[1] https://www.oilshell.org/blog/2018/04/26.html

A few more truly in the vibe of open source projects not advertising their hosting providers: https://plane.so/ , https://element.io/ , https://www.loomio.com/ , https://zulip.com/ , and it keeps going... Very few open source projects, in the FOSS sense, are advertising their hosting provider.

I was so excited to see this happen!

I'm not a customer of yours, but your blog posts inspired me a lot. Your journey through quitting caffeine is a great and heartening read.

I've got two things to say;

1) Will you consider source-availabling the web portal (app.keygen.sh) too? Some enterprises could use it for easy management/support for custoner's licenses. Although now that I think about it, it could also discourage custom, more suitable implementations for each use-case... I'm torn on this one. I would like to see it available on GitHub too just out of curiosity too. It's very beautiful.

2) For a team + customers' chat, I cannot recommend Zulip enough. It's a joy to use and has the most innovative chat system I've ever seen. https://zulip.com

I hope your business keeps prospering!

Zulip | Senior Flutter Engineer | REMOTE or San Francisco | Full-time | https://zulip.com/

At Zulip, we’re out to build the world’s best collaboration platform, and we’re committed to keeping it 100% open source. Zulip is the only modern team chat app that is designed for both live and asynchronous conversations. Our product serves as the communication hub for businesses, open-source projects, educators and communities around the world.

We're building the next generation of Zulip's mobile apps in Flutter. We're looking for a senior engineer with Flutter experience to join our small core team and help define the future of team chat. Our Flutter prototype is just a few months old, so this is a greenfield opportunity to help shape the app's architecture from early on.

For full details, check out https://zulip.com/jobs/. Apply at [email protected].

Anyways, I'm an internet stranger, not a social media expert. So let me know what you all think. And if we make a discord or zulip or something to make this a reality, let me know and I'd love to help any way I can.