Render.com is another spiritual successor of Heroku. I'd love a world where Fly and Render are both very successful companies.

Render has some great features like making a new sub domain for when a PR is opened so you can test it as a fully working API before you merge

That’s supported on most PAAS these days, including Heroku.

On their free tiers though?

Well, no longer free on Heroku, but it was

did not know heroku had that.

I believe Netlify introduced this feature. It is now ubiquitous (as alexgrover said).

Not gonna happen. Both will get acquired because that’s how things work now

Unless a company is very explicit about this not being in the books, I tend to share this outlook.

From the perspective of a recent founder, it's downright spooky to build around any SaaS, considering how few of them have been around for 10+ years, when that is certainly what our business is aiming for.

I know (and share the feels): Devs tend to get excited about the new thing – but if Google Workspace shut down next month, we would be in so much operational trouble. When other peoples fancies stand in the way of the entire operation you are responsible for, it actually begs the question how much closed source SaaS you can allow before it starts to be quite frankly irresponsible.

We are not imagining things. SaaS of all sizes shut down all the time, and when you are heavily relying on them and building software around them to run a business the prospect is spooky as hell.

The difference between (free) Gmail and Google workspace is that workspace is a paid product. If you're big enough to warrant an AM, you can get terms which include continuity of business planning if Google does happen to shut down Workspace. (They won't.)

Is your argument that Workspace is a paid product and therefore won’t be shut down? If yes, let’s keep in mind that Stadia was paid-for too. My trust in the longevity of Google products has been damaged beyond repair.

The difference is that Stadia was definitely losing money, whereas Google Workspace might be profitable.

Not sure why this is downvoted, it’s a valid point.

I'm guessing that downvotes come from those who see the macro environment changing. With increased rates, borrowing to purchase companies may make less sense.

Macro makes it harder to raise funding too though - VC no longer as attractive given the risks and higher interest rates available

These threads from mrkurt a few months ago seem relevant here -

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32955520

If they are a multiplier for a whole portfolio, there's not much reason for any particular branch to purchase them.

(This post seems like some evidence they might actually be building the wrong thing, though.)

(Render founder) I'd love to understand why you think this is the only outcome. Render has positive gross margin and a clear path to profitability based on both our growth so far and the tailwinds in this space. I'm also aware of other companies like ours that have grown all the way to IPO or are well on their way.

I'm very explicit both internally and externally that an acquisition is a failure mode for Render. We're building this for the very long term and plan to keep it that way.

I guess I’m just default cynical these days seeing how much money’s still floating around and the scale of the cloud big 3. Apologies, it wasn’t personal. I admire your vision and hope it can work, money always seems to talk eventually though. We need more companies that have the nerve to hold on and develop on their own.

I admire your sentiment, at the same time founding teams don't typically say no to US$XX,XXX,XXX,XXX acquisition offers that'd cash you out for at least a few billion to you personally.

Are there any examples where the capitalism bottom line is ignored and a company keeps growing with extremely premium generous acquisition offers on the table? I can't think of any, but there could be a few. However, I expect it's pretty rare.

For companies with such tremendous growth, the venture capitalist firms are primarily looking to make their <big-multiplier> return and push priorities accordingly (understandably).

Market forces in capitalism are highly potent.

> I'd love to understand why you think this is the only outcome.

I’m curious why you think it isn’t? On a long enough timescale all good things seem to be acquired by large megacorps for a fuckton of money.

Slack, Linode, Minecraft, the list goes on. Eventually they all make the thing less than it was before under the founders’ vision. At least from my perspective.

It won’t stop me from cheering them on, but I’m still very skeptical of them not being bought out in 10 years.

Spotify, Apple, Amazon, Facebook, Twitter (kinda), Valve all have not been acquired and have existed for a long timescale...

That's clearly survivorship bias.

What you want to know is the probability of a small, independent, high quality provider remaining independent, high quality and not bankrupt.

It does seem to be rare in the tech space, especially in the US. Becoming one of the largest public corporations on earth is one way to do it, as you suggested, but the odds of that happening are miniscule.

For obvious reasons I’m excluding the companies doing the acquiring.

Except Valve I guess, but that was never a public company that could be acquired to satisfy investors in the first place.

Times are now different money is not free anymore so those big acquisitions need to make real business sense.

Yeah I like them both a lot, having tried deploying small projects on each. However, I’ve defaulted to render at the moment because I’ve found it painless for my current project, and edge compute is low on my list of priorities.

Though to be fair, even if render collapsed overnight, I think I’d still be equally satisfied after moving to fly.

I'm waiting for a site that does comparison matrixes. It should have checkboxes for autoscaled compute, easy build/push, scheduled/queued tasks, WAF and CDN, object storage (wish Render had this specifically), emails, easy addons to other SaaS.

  > Flyctl for AWS

Have you tried AWS Copilot? I’m having good success with it. Probably not quite as simple as flyctl, but still it’s only one command to deploy a container.

I would really like fly.io to overcome these hurdles. I bet they will.

I can second that I‘ve seen render.com mentioned very often, maybe even more so than fly.

> What I truly want and probably lots of other people too is Flyctl for AWS. The same simplicity to run as fly, but give me something cheap in Virginia or the Dallas.

Pardon the ignorance, is this not the Amplify CLI [1] ?

[1]: https://docs.amplify.aws/cli/

No

Can you elaborate?

Things that just work and are delight to use and the AWS Amplify CLI are not often mentioned together. The Amplify CLI is a growing collection of poorly thought out, poorly implemented functionality that looks good in demos, but falls apart under any close inspection.

I can only assume that if you’ve ever used the amplify cli it makes total sense.

At least that single ‘no’ contained a whole wealth of blood and tears to me.

(No the OP)

I like Amplify and use it often. However, it isn't well integrated with "normal" backends, so if you want to keep a backend and frontend deployed together you either have to use their Amplify backend API or work out your own deployment.

> What I truly want and probably lots of other people too is Flyctl for AWS. The same simplicity to run as fly, but give me something cheap in Virginia or the Dalles.

Google Cloud. It is painfully easy to spin up managed postgres, super easy to deploy gcp cloud functions or gcp cloud run. It isn't expensive either and just works.

If someone is not already using the holy trinity (AWS/Azure/GCP) there is probably a reason.

I'm not using gcp anymore because it's not worth risk losing access to my personal gmail account just to play around with pet projects.

I might be paranoid, but I just don't feel comfortable when there's so much in play.

Create a new Gmail account?

Google associates different accounts that are from the same owner when handling issues FYI. So if they think your account is doing something wrong on GCP, be wary of associated accounts.

Never once heard of that.

Did you read the comments? My takeaway is that it was bs.

There was one person strongly challenging the story and plenty of back and forth. It hardly seems a settled case one way or the other.

Separating concerns, isolating things that are not related, these are some basic tenets of good engineering. Yet we all keep rolling the ball of mud downhill and act shocked it keeps growing and swallowing everything.

That's the beauty of the services I named. Super easy to roll the code to any other similar PaaS provider. There is no vendor lockin.

It is postgres + http handlers.

Totally agree with this mindset. My digital life is on the line because Google refuses to separate services.

Egress pricing, for one.

fly.io charges an outrageous 2 cents/GB. Google is over 4x that.

At fly.io rates, 1Gbps average over a month is $6400/mo. Google is tiered and you’re looking at over $10k/mo.

For comparison, a cheap managed switch that can handle 1Gbps cost about $100, maybe a bit more if you want a nice one. A nice router is more. You can rent an entire rack, including power, cooling, and an unmetered 1Gbps for $300-$1k/mo (with maybe some wiggle room on both ends). You can buy a pretty nice server, amortize the price over a week or two, and still come out ahead.

You certainly get considerable value from a major cloud provider, and a lot of their other services are reasonably priced, but, depending on your workload, the egress prices and the corresponding Hotel California factor may make using a major cloud provider a poor proposition.

It's potentially a lot more for the big clouds. Anything in the network path has a charge - load balancers, NAT gateways, etc.

The cost of egress plus a gateway or two is fairly close to the cost of burning a DVD twenty years ago. And it appears to actually be cheaper to burn DVDs and mail them today than to send data from a major cloud.

This becomes very relevant for things like archiving data. If you generate data outside of a major cloud, you can pay a major cloud a very reasonable fee to archive it for you. But if you ever download your archive, it will cost you about half the price of buying an external disk to store it on.

(To be fair, object storage is rather more reliable than a single crappy external drive. But if you access the data more than once, maybe you should have a colo or on-prem copy too.)

Depending on what I'm building, I tend to cache on the edge with something like CloudFlare in front of GCP. Lowers the egress charges significantly, with the benefit of speeding everything up too.

Do you have a guide in mind?

If it's sorting and sifting and clicking a bunch of stuff in the console, that's not painfully simple. If it's some easy cli commands, I think that's in the ballpark...

There is a gcloud cli, but I just automated deployments in CI...

https://github.com/google-github-actions/deploy-cloud-functi...

I think this whole category is interesting, from the next-gen PaaS to the cloud-native ecosystem. Totally empathize with how hard what fly is doing in terms of scale and reliability is.

At Coherence (withcoherence.com) we're focused on a developer experience layer on top of AWS/GCP. You might describe it as flyctl for AWS.