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No worries, this is a valid point and does not come off as a dismissal. As you said, there are many PaaS's built on Kubernetes. And they lie in a spectrum of ab

No worries, this is a valid point and does not come off as a dismissal. As you said, there are many PaaS's built on Kubernetes. And they lie in a spectrum of abstraction: on one end, there are OpenShift and Rancher that requires knowledge of Kubernetes to some extent. On the other end of the spectrum, there are hosted PaaS's like Render that look more like Heroku, and the user does not even know that their applications are running on Kubernetes. In my opinion, at least as it currently stands, Cloud 66's Maestro and Convox fall somewhere in between. Our goal with Porter is to create a platform that accommodates both ends of the spectrum. And this is motivated by seeing companies develop internal developer platform (IdP) that I mention in the post - we want to create a platform that abstracts k8s away to the extent of Heroku's DX while accommodating the DevOps engineers' need for flexibility/configurability on top of k8s. This is why we invested in features that optionally give the user more visibility into the underlying k8s cluster and helm charts. By default, Porter looks and works just like Heroku. With "devops mode" turned on, Porter looks more like OpenShift and Rancher. Essentially, there are two user personas we are building for: an application developer with no knowledge of k8s and the devops engineers who need to help the application developers and often even build out an IdP. We are focused on the former for now, but I think what distinguishes us from the other k8s based PaaS's is our commitment to building the mature version of Porter to accommodate the latter.

mwcampbell 5y ago
Thanks for that response. Do you have any plans to cater to devops engineers who want to use infrastructure as code tools such as Pulumi or Terraform to manage both their Kubernetes cluster and their other cloud resources (e.g. AWS RDS database) with one tool? Also, just so you know, the abbreviation IdP (with that particular capitalization) is already a term in security, particularly in the context of single sign-on; there it stands for identity provider. Edit: I suggest IPaaS as an alternative.
- abelanger 5y ago
  Co-founder (Alexander) here. > Do you have any plans to cater to devops engineers who want to use infrastructure as code tools such as Pulumi or Terraform to manage both their Kubernetes cluster and their other cloud resources (e.g. AWS RDS database) with one tool? Yes, this is a request that we've gotten from current users, and we'd like to release a Terraform module in the next two months that allows users to provision a cluster compatible with Porter for this exact use-case. We're also thinking about releasing a Terraform module that can install a cluster hosting the PaaS layer for fully on-prem use-cases. This wouldn't be too hard to do considering our cluster provisioner is packaged as a Terraform runner and we use Terraform to manage our infrastructure internally. Also, we're going to open-source our provisioner in a separate repo at some point soon, and we're thinking about using Pulumi to get slightly more control over the automated infrastructure provisioning (using Pulumi's automation API: https://www.pulumi.com/blog/automation-api/ https://www.pulumi.com/blog/automation-api/). So I wouldn't be surprised if we released something more native to Pulumi as well, but we have to look into it more. > Also, just so you know, the abbreviation IdP (with that particular capitalization) is already a term in security, particularly in the context of single sign-on; there it stands for identity provider. Edit: I suggest IPaaS as an alternative. I thought I recognized that abbreviation -- I believe we picked it up after reading an interesting article about various internal dev platforms[1] (to be fair, that article uses the capitalization IDP). [1] https://www.infoworld.com/article/3611369/how-to-build-an-internal-developer-platform-from-those-who-have-done-it.html https://www.infoworld.com/article/3611369/how-to-build-an-in...

mwcampbell 5y ago

Thanks for that response. Do you have any plans to cater to devops engineers who want to use infrastructure as code tools such as Pulumi or Terraform to manage both their Kubernetes cluster and their other cloud resources (e.g. AWS RDS database) with one tool? Also, just so you know, the abbreviation IdP (with that particular capitalization) is already a term in security, particularly in the context of single sign-on; there it stands for identity provider. Edit: I suggest IPaaS as an alternative.

abelanger 5y ago
Co-founder (Alexander) here. > Do you have any plans to cater to devops engineers who want to use infrastructure as code tools such as Pulumi or Terraform to manage both their Kubernetes cluster and their other cloud resources (e.g. AWS RDS database) with one tool? Yes, this is a request that we've gotten from current users, and we'd like to release a Terraform module in the next two months that allows users to provision a cluster compatible with Porter for this exact use-case. We're also thinking about releasing a Terraform module that can install a cluster hosting the PaaS layer for fully on-prem use-cases. This wouldn't be too hard to do considering our cluster provisioner is packaged as a Terraform runner and we use Terraform to manage our infrastructure internally. Also, we're going to open-source our provisioner in a separate repo at some point soon, and we're thinking about using Pulumi to get slightly more control over the automated infrastructure provisioning (using Pulumi's automation API: https://www.pulumi.com/blog/automation-api/ https://www.pulumi.com/blog/automation-api/). So I wouldn't be surprised if we released something more native to Pulumi as well, but we have to look into it more. > Also, just so you know, the abbreviation IdP (with that particular capitalization) is already a term in security, particularly in the context of single sign-on; there it stands for identity provider. Edit: I suggest IPaaS as an alternative. I thought I recognized that abbreviation -- I believe we picked it up after reading an interesting article about various internal dev platforms[1] (to be fair, that article uses the capitalization IDP). [1] https://www.infoworld.com/article/3611369/how-to-build-an-internal-developer-platform-from-those-who-have-done-it.html https://www.infoworld.com/article/3611369/how-to-build-an-in...