Our great sponsors
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terraform
Terraform enables you to safely and predictably create, change, and improve infrastructure. It is a source-available tool that codifies APIs into declarative configuration files that can be shared amongst team members, treated as code, edited, reviewed, and versioned.
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WorkOS
The modern identity platform for B2B SaaS. The APIs are flexible and easy-to-use, supporting authentication, user identity, and complex enterprise features like SSO and SCIM provisioning.
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Pulumi
Pulumi - Infrastructure as Code in any programming language. Build infrastructure intuitively on any cloud using familiar languages 🚀
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Packer
Packer is a tool for creating identical machine images for multiple platforms from a single source configuration.
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InfluxDB
Power Real-Time Data Analytics at Scale. Get real-time insights from all types of time series data with InfluxDB. Ingest, query, and analyze billions of data points in real-time with unbounded cardinality.
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Ansible
Ansible is a radically simple IT automation platform that makes your applications and systems easier to deploy and maintain. Automate everything from code deployment to network configuration to cloud management, in a language that approaches plain English, using SSH, with no agents to install on remote systems. https://docs.ansible.com.
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Hasura
Blazing fast, instant realtime GraphQL APIs on your DB with fine grained access control, also trigger webhooks on database events.
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aws-lambda-java-libs
Official mirror for interface definitions and helper classes for Java code running on the AWS Lambda platform.
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SaaSHub
SaaSHub - Software Alternatives and Reviews. SaaSHub helps you find the best software and product alternatives
Docker didn’t have a default way to run on multiple hosts, and so in the wake of docker’s explosive adoption there was a rush of different solutions offered for scheduling containers across a fleet. One of the first well-adopted solutions was actually called fleet - it was part of CoreOS, whose team went on to be very influential throughout the container revolution. This was in the systemd era, and was basically seen as a multi-host systemd. It was very cool and it worked great!
Infrastructure as Code (IaC) is an important part of any true hosting operation in the public cloud. Each of these platforms has their own IaC solution, e.g. AWS CloudFormation. But they also support popular open-source IaC tools like Pulumi or Terraform. A category of tools that also needs to be discussed is API gateways and other app-specific load balancers. There are applications for internal consumption, which can be called microservices if you have a lot of them. And often microservices use advanced networking options such as a service mesh instead of just the native private network offered by a VPC.
We see some great results from using these in conjunction with frameworks such as SST or Serverless, and also some real spaghetti from people who organically proliferate 100’s of functions over time and lose track of how they relate to each other or how to update them safely across time and service. Buyer beware!
Qovery: Qovery simplifies the deployment process for Kubernetes by letting you declare your project's structure and dependencies, making it an excellent choice for startups looking to focus on development without worrying about infrastructure.
Infrastructure as Code (IaC) is an important part of any true hosting operation in the public cloud. Each of these platforms has their own IaC solution, e.g. AWS CloudFormation. But they also support popular open-source IaC tools like Pulumi or Terraform. A category of tools that also needs to be discussed is API gateways and other app-specific load balancers. There are applications for internal consumption, which can be called microservices if you have a lot of them. And often microservices use advanced networking options such as a service mesh instead of just the native private network offered by a VPC.
To manage a VM, you can use something as simple as just manual actions over SSH, or can use tools like Ansible, Hashicorp's Packer and Terraform or other automations. For an app where there is minimal load and security/reliability concern, VMs are still a great option that provide a lot of value for the buck
Serverless functions are now offered by many cloud providers, as well as having options like OpenFaaS, Knative, Apache's Openwhisk and more from the open source community that run in environments ranging from one server all the way up to globally replicated private clusters.
In the beginning, there was docker. In 2013, building on linux internals, docker packaged containers for mass adoption and made it easy to share a complete runtime environment for an application across the network. Check out their first demo at PyCon 2013 (I was there!) At the time, serious workloads ran on something like Mesos, which was not “container-native” and had its own way of packaging and distributing software across a cloud or data center footprint.
A VM is the original “hosting” product of the cloud era. Over the last 20 years, VM providers have come and gone, as have enterprise virtualization solutions such as VMware. Today you can do this somewhere like OVHcloud, Hetzner or DigitalOcean, which took over the “server” market from the early 2000’s. Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud Platform (GCP), and Microsoft's Azure also offer VMs, at a less competitive price. In their case, the VMs are either a building block for other services or the value is in the ecosystem. See the section on public cloud below for more.
To manage a VM, you can use something as simple as just manual actions over SSH, or can use tools like Ansible, Hashicorp's Packer and Terraform or other automations. For an app where there is minimal load and security/reliability concern, VMs are still a great option that provide a lot of value for the buck
Platform as a Service (PaaS) is a term that captures tools built for developers to use where they don’t need devops engineers to deploy to the cloud. Heroku was the “category-defining” product here, and modern successors include Vercel, Render, Railway, Replit, platform.sh, Aptible, Northflank, and more. We have to say that there are some amazing products in this category. Developer Experience is at a premium!
Today, this ecosystem is going strong with new providers like Hasura, AppWrite and Supabase powering millions of projects. There are a few reasons people choose this style of hosting, especially if they are more comfortable with frontend development. BaaS lets them set up a database in a secure way, expose some business logic on top of the data, and connect via a dev-friendly SDK from their app or website code to save data easily. These modern tools build a blend of managed database with curated plugins such as authentication, great admin dashboards, and function as a service type capability - all in one package, and often offered as a integrated hosted service.
Replit is the category leader here, but other products in this space include: Glitch, Codesphere, StackBlitz. Coherence fits here as well, with our “Workspaces” Cloud IDE. We’re also the only option where the PaaS is replaced by an Internal Developer Platform.
We see some great results from using these in conjunction with frameworks such as SST or Serverless, and also some real spaghetti from people who organically proliferate 100’s of functions over time and lose track of how they relate to each other or how to update them safely across time and service. Buyer beware!
Platform as a Service (PaaS) is a term that captures tools built for developers to use where they don’t need devops engineers to deploy to the cloud. Heroku was the “category-defining” product here, and modern successors include Vercel, Render, Railway, Replit, platform.sh, Aptible, Northflank, and more. We have to say that there are some amazing products in this category. Developer Experience is at a premium!
Platform as a Service (PaaS) is a term that captures tools built for developers to use where they don’t need devops engineers to deploy to the cloud. Heroku was the “category-defining” product here, and modern successors include Vercel, Render, Railway, Replit, platform.sh, Aptible, Northflank, and more. We have to say that there are some amazing products in this category. Developer Experience is at a premium!
Backend as a Service (BaaS) goes back to early 2010’s with companies like Parse and Firebase. These products integrated everything a backend provides to a webapp in a single, integrated package that makes it easier to get started and enables you to offload some of the devops maintenance work to someone else.
Serverless functions are now offered by many cloud providers, as well as having options like OpenFaaS, Knative, Apache's Openwhisk and more from the open source community that run in environments ranging from one server all the way up to globally replicated private clusters.
The single most important development in hosting since the invention of EC2 is defined by its own 3-letter acronym: k8s. Kubernetes has won the “container orchestrator” space, becoming the default way that teams across industries are managing their compute nodes and scheduling their workloads, from data pipelines to web services.
Serverless functions are now offered by many cloud providers, as well as having options like OpenFaaS, Knative, Apache's Openwhisk and more from the open source community that run in environments ranging from one server all the way up to globally replicated private clusters.
Docker itself intended to build the answer here, it was the deployment platform of the future and was going to be the heart of their business model. It was called “docker swarm” and unfortunately by the time it arrived there was a fragmented market of already-adopted solutions. Docker as a package format was a runaway winner, and Docker Hub (which became the foundation for the current Docker, Inc. business) was widely used. But the fragmented runtime market left room for a new entrant: (drumroll please…) enter Kubernetes. It was a “community-driven open source project” that was in fact funded and well-staffed by Google engineers, and rose quickly on the claim of being an open-source implementation of Google’s storied internal cluster management system called “borg.”
Single-page applications (SPAs) existed before S3, but given that you still had to set up, scale, and maintain servers using something like Apache or NGINX in order to serve them, the advantages for “Ops” or “DevOps” were not so different to running a “real server” with a language like PHP, python, or Java.
It’s also well understood that having a k8s cluster is not enough to make developers able to host their services - you need a devops team to work with them, using tools like delivery pipelines, Helm, kustomize, infra as code, service mesh, ingress, secrets management, key management - the list goes on! Developer Portals like Backstage, Port and Cortex have started to emerge to help manage some of this complexity.
Today, this ecosystem is going strong with new providers like Hasura, AppWrite and Supabase powering millions of projects. There are a few reasons people choose this style of hosting, especially if they are more comfortable with frontend development. BaaS lets them set up a database in a secure way, expose some business logic on top of the data, and connect via a dev-friendly SDK from their app or website code to save data easily. These modern tools build a blend of managed database with curated plugins such as authentication, great admin dashboards, and function as a service type capability - all in one package, and often offered as a integrated hosted service.
Backend as a Service (BaaS) goes back to early 2010’s with companies like Parse and Firebase. These products integrated everything a backend provides to a webapp in a single, integrated package that makes it easier to get started and enables you to offload some of the devops maintenance work to someone else.
The modern iteration of these tools has taken the developer experience learnings from the Platform as a Service (PaaS) category, and will bring them to your own VM, giving you your own personal PaaS. Example of this include Dokku, Coolify, Caprover, Cloud66 and many more!
The modern iteration of these tools has taken the developer experience learnings from the Platform as a Service (PaaS) category, and will bring them to your own VM, giving you your own personal PaaS. Example of this include Dokku, Coolify, Caprover, Cloud66 and many more!
Examples for products in this category are: Google Cloud Run, AWS App Runner, Azure Container Apps. Each has different scalability, cost, and integration trade-offs.
A VM is the original “hosting” product of the cloud era. Over the last 20 years, VM providers have come and gone, as have enterprise virtualization solutions such as VMware. Today you can do this somewhere like OVHcloud, Hetzner or DigitalOcean, which took over the “server” market from the early 2000’s. Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud Platform (GCP), and Microsoft's Azure also offer VMs, at a less competitive price. In their case, the VMs are either a building block for other services or the value is in the ecosystem. See the section on public cloud below for more.
For the third, examples here might be analytics plugins in specialized databases like Clickhouse, data-transformations in places like your ETL pipeline using Airflow or Fivetran, or special integrations in your authentication workflow with Auth0 hooks and rules.
It’s also well understood that having a k8s cluster is not enough to make developers able to host their services - you need a devops team to work with them, using tools like delivery pipelines, Helm, kustomize, infra as code, service mesh, ingress, secrets management, key management - the list goes on! Developer Portals like Backstage, Port and Cortex have started to emerge to help manage some of this complexity.
The first product that popularized the term “serverless” was AWS Lambda, which is both the prototypical and archetypical function as a service provider. It also has a great name, which pings back to its envisioned place in the cloud of the future. In computer programming, a lambda, often referred to as a lambda function or lambda expression, is a concise way to represent an anonymous function, which is a function without a name. The concept originates from lambda calculus in mathematical logic and has been adopted by many programming languages, each with its own syntax and characteristics.
The single most important development in hosting since the invention of EC2 is defined by its own 3-letter acronym: k8s. Kubernetes has won the “container orchestrator” space, becoming the default way that teams across industries are managing their compute nodes and scheduling their workloads, from data pipelines to web services.
Infrastructure as Code (IaC) is an important part of any true hosting operation in the public cloud. Each of these platforms has their own IaC solution, e.g. AWS CloudFormation. But they also support popular open-source IaC tools like Pulumi or Terraform. A category of tools that also needs to be discussed is API gateways and other app-specific load balancers. There are applications for internal consumption, which can be called microservices if you have a lot of them. And often microservices use advanced networking options such as a service mesh instead of just the native private network offered by a VPC.
Examples for products in this category are: Google Cloud Run, AWS App Runner, Azure Container Apps. Each has different scalability, cost, and integration trade-offs.
For the third, examples here might be analytics plugins in specialized databases like Clickhouse, data-transformations in places like your ETL pipeline using Airflow or Fivetran, or special integrations in your authentication workflow with Auth0 hooks and rules.
Today, this ecosystem is going strong with new providers like Hasura, AppWrite and Supabase powering millions of projects. There are a few reasons people choose this style of hosting, especially if they are more comfortable with frontend development. BaaS lets them set up a database in a secure way, expose some business logic on top of the data, and connect via a dev-friendly SDK from their app or website code to save data easily. These modern tools build a blend of managed database with curated plugins such as authentication, great admin dashboards, and function as a service type capability - all in one package, and often offered as a integrated hosted service.