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Is it a PaaS on top of kubernetes? I mean if you want to be cloud agnostic, you can use kubernetes. Having tried to build a PaaS like experience, the value pro

Is it a PaaS on top of kubernetes? I mean if you want to be cloud agnostic, you can use kubernetes. Having tried to build a PaaS like experience, the value proposition that you are proposing is actually a self fulfilling prophecy. Just moving containers and apps is not enough. Large scale data migration from buckets to databases is super expensive and non trivial. One of situations that is quite commons is canary migration, where they would like to run both cloud providers and slowly phase one out. That is non-trivial too. Certificates starts become invalid, the migration is also dictated by how the apps are written too. Also, startup are fairly easy to acquire but very hard to monetize for the amount of effort that would go into building everything resilient. I think biggest problem is the sheer amount of permutation and combination of things.

igorzij 5y ago
A bit more complex than that :) PaaS on top of K8S have a problem of serving no one - because for small cases they're too heavy and for large teams too inflexible, they could just as well use K8S directly. Alicorn actually generates infra-as-code (Terraform) using modular "targets". By default for container it uses managed engine provided by the cloud provider which costs way less than a dedicated K8S cluster (on AWS that'd be Fargate) But K8S is fully supported too - when you create an environment you can pick a Kubernetes target and get a cluster
igorzij 5y ago
re data migration: yes, that's hard. we are leaving that to the user for now - but with infra out of the way this still makes it radically easier to move. more importantly, approaches to data migration are few and established, whereas infra is bespoke effort re monetization / permutation: we think we've solved this by having PaaS as the first step. that means we can provide defaults that we know how to handle end-to-end. the differences in modern SaaS stacks aren't that dramatic, and by making a few established patterns super easy to follow we can achieve high degree of uniformity
- debarshri 5y ago
  Look, I am not sure if you are trying to be VC backed or not. But I think you can have a decent sized business with 10 people or so. But the market is really really small and it is red ocean. There is lot of people doing the same thing, like porter.dev, quovery, etc. When we were doing this, what we saw was the moment a company becomes serious they will decide to do all of this themselves. Companies want to own the IaC which you are taking away. Cool aspect of the platform is actually the negative thing from an enterprise point of view. I think it will impact LTV. They want to own their own terraform script. Scripts you are generating can be written in matter of minutes by seasoned devops engineer. There is not really a moat.
  - fukmbas 5y ago
    There is definitely a need
  - igorzij 5y ago
    Thank you! I really appreciate your take on it. Very valid concerns, and we are well aware. Here's the "map of the ocean" we were able to collate over the last few months: https://www.notion.so/diggerdev/Landscape-around-Digger-2e229da221ba46a4ba8def7f72142283 https://www.notion.so/diggerdev/Landscape-around-Digger-2e22... We are indeed VC backed. And we know that it's a tough market to crack. But we also know that the opportunity is enormously large - because the right product could replace a large chunk of DevOps consulting, and from there expand into the holy grail of the "enterprise core". So worth trying. Yes it can be written in minutes by a seasoned DevOps engineer. But access to seasoned DevOps engineers means either hiring them full-time or paying a huge consulting premium. Yes people want to own their Terraform - and we encourage that. You can simply connect your repository with TF and Alicorn will do two-way sync.

igorzij 5y ago

A bit more complex than that :) PaaS on top of K8S have a problem of serving no one - because for small cases they're too heavy and for large teams too inflexible, they could just as well use K8S directly. Alicorn actually generates infra-as-code (Terraform) using modular "targets". By default for container it uses managed engine provided by the cloud provider which costs way less than a dedicated K8S cluster (on AWS that'd be Fargate) But K8S is fully supported too - when you create an environment you can pick a Kubernetes target and get a cluster

igorzij 5y ago

re data migration: yes, that's hard. we are leaving that to the user for now - but with infra out of the way this still makes it radically easier to move. more importantly, approaches to data migration are few and established, whereas infra is bespoke effort re monetization / permutation: we think we've solved this by having PaaS as the first step. that means we can provide defaults that we know how to handle end-to-end. the differences in modern SaaS stacks aren't that dramatic, and by making a few established patterns super easy to follow we can achieve high degree of uniformity

debarshri 5y ago
Look, I am not sure if you are trying to be VC backed or not. But I think you can have a decent sized business with 10 people or so. But the market is really really small and it is red ocean. There is lot of people doing the same thing, like porter.dev, quovery, etc. When we were doing this, what we saw was the moment a company becomes serious they will decide to do all of this themselves. Companies want to own the IaC which you are taking away. Cool aspect of the platform is actually the negative thing from an enterprise point of view. I think it will impact LTV. They want to own their own terraform script. Scripts you are generating can be written in matter of minutes by seasoned devops engineer. There is not really a moat.
- fukmbas 5y ago
  There is definitely a need
- igorzij 5y ago
  Thank you! I really appreciate your take on it. Very valid concerns, and we are well aware. Here's the "map of the ocean" we were able to collate over the last few months: https://www.notion.so/diggerdev/Landscape-around-Digger-2e229da221ba46a4ba8def7f72142283 https://www.notion.so/diggerdev/Landscape-around-Digger-2e22... We are indeed VC backed. And we know that it's a tough market to crack. But we also know that the opportunity is enormously large - because the right product could replace a large chunk of DevOps consulting, and from there expand into the holy grail of the "enterprise core". So worth trying. Yes it can be written in minutes by a seasoned DevOps engineer. But access to seasoned DevOps engineers means either hiring them full-time or paying a huge consulting premium. Yes people want to own their Terraform - and we encourage that. You can simply connect your repository with TF and Alicorn will do two-way sync.