21 ms·
Buf raises $93M to deprecate REST/JSON
- duxup 5y agoThe idea of "I'm raising money to get people to stop using REST/JSON" seems kinda weird to me. I get that they have a product and all but the general lead in here seems weird to me.
- eps 5y agoYay, an XML v2.
- selfhoster11 5y agoMore like WSDL.
- duxup 5y agoNo need to be cruel.
- PhoenixReborn 5y agoThe $93M number in the headline is somewhat misleading, as it's cumulative across all the rounds of funding. Can the title be changed to state that the specific round raised now is a $68M Series B? Article quote: > We just closed a $68M Series B co-led By Lux and Tiger Global, with participation from Greenoaks Capital Partners, Lightspeed, Addition, and Haystack.
- catsarebetter 5y agoHmm why do they need to raise so much cash every 9 months? Also does anyone here use them and have any thoughts about their product?
- selfhoster11 5y agoI don't even know why they need so much money for what they do. Based on their website, they solve the following problems: - a central schema registery. Even if that's something you actually want, it's not a problem that requires $93M to solve, or a commercial company to operate - communicating schema changes primarily via human-oriented sources like handwritten documentation on emails. I mean sure, if you are a masochist (or a sufficiently inefficient org), you might do just that. The rest of us here in the 21st century can check the schema into a Git repo instead. - schema drift on the client end. Tough, this is what happens when you write software. Adding a third party won't help here. - dependency management. For APIs? I cannot imagine a single case where that would help and your API isn't already a monstrosity.
- catsarebetter 5y agoHmm well I get that we're in an asset bubble with startups, but if this company is creating jobs, then I think it's somewhat reasonable to assume that they are fixing a problem ppl are willing to pay for. I do agree with what you're saying from my perspective as an average swe that doesn't do anything highly specialized... I wonder though, what would the workflows look like for a swe, product, ops person even, where schema changes get passed around and edited so much, (kind of making some assumptions here, comparing central schema registry to crm use cases), that this would be necessary... Wonder what the shape of the problem looks like...
- ByteJockey 5y agoIs there enough money to recoup investment if they don't get the average engineer churning out crud apps? I mean, there probably is, but what kind of market penetration would this require if you are only going after the specialists?
- elzbardico 5y agoJSON is a powerful enemy, it takes lots of money to wage war against such a cunning opponent
- catsarebetter 5y agoYou might enjoy reading about karpman's triangle haha
- elzbardico 5y agoThou shalt not take the menace of json in jest young man!
- catsarebetter 5y agoWait what how do u know I'm young and a man lol
- Guest42 5y agoI’ve seen json do some powerful things.
- kentonv 5y ago> Hmm why do they need to raise so much cash every 9 months? Well, they say the best time to take investment is when you don't need it. If you wait until you need it then the terms will be worse. If investors are offering you money when you don't need it, it may be the best time to accept it. The sequence of raises here look like a fairly normal sequence for a growing startup, except that they happened much closer together than would be typical. The terms aren't shown but assuming they are in line with a typical sequence then this is a great outcome for buf as it gives them lots of room to build their vision without needing to stress over money for a while. > Also does anyone here use them and have any thoughts about their product? FWIW, long ago I was the maintainer of Protobuf at Google, including putting together the first open source release. I like what buf is doing -- enough that, full disclosure, I made an angel investment in their seed round. There's a huge amount of room for better tooling around Protobuf. Binary and strongly-typed protocols require strong tooling to be usable, but with tooling they can be much better than dynamic and text-based approaches. Like, the fact that the protocol is binary shouldn't make it any harder for a human to read it, because your tools should decode it for you on-demand as easily as you could `cat` a text file. Protobuf historically has had sort of the bare minimum tooling and required a lot of ad hoc copying proto files around between projects to get anywhere, which was a pain. A registry seems like the right first step to making things easier, but I'm really excited about what can be done after that... once you have strong type information, you can have tools to dynamically explore APIs, trace communications, etc.
- catsarebetter 5y agoYou could even build a marketplace on top of the first layer for devs to build their own tooling... Hmm interesting, I need to go read some books, gimme a few weeks to come up with an intelligent response, thanks for your insight
- gravypod 5y ago> FWIW, long ago I was the maintainer of Protobuf at Google, including putting together the first open source release. I like what buf is doing -- enough that, full disclosure, I made an angel investment in their seed round. I know this might not be the best way to ask but have they considered creating proto rules for Bazel? The existing proto + gRPC story is pretty unfortunate.
- selfhoster11 5y agoLol. Imagine trying to capture a market that is already mostly happy with what it's got, and for free.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- Guest42 5y agoAnd to then provide roi on 93m
- selfhoster11 5y agoI have a feeling that to extract this much cash from a data format ecosystem, you'd have to suck it dry of anything valuable.
- Guest42 5y agopbaas, pronounced pbass
- anm89 5y agoI've got a feeling this has to be some kind of enterprise play. Random devs are not going to pay for a data format.
- anm89 5y agoNice. so SOAP?
- rescbr 5y agoMore like DCOM. What is old is new again!
- opendomain 5y agoI am on the exact opposite end of the spectrum. I have been promoting json ever since Douglas Crockford discovered it. Even my twitter handle is @json. If someone wants to use json.com to create a company to promote json - DM me.
- moralestapia 5y ago100% my thoughts as well. I want to help, but how do I get in touch? Shoot me an email, mine's on my HN profile.
- scrollaway 5y ago> how do I get in touch? If I'm deciphering the parent's comment correctly, probably with an HTTP POST to https://json.com/json https://json.com/json {"json": "I love JSON!"} --- btw @opendomain: the twitter handle on the site is outdated.
- jokethrowaway 5y agoWe already have schema based validation in tons of different shapes. A binary format may save some bandwidth and be slightly harder to reverse engineer - at the cost of being easily introspectable out of the box during development. I don't think there is enough value to sell something. I hope it gains traction and cargo cuting companies with bored engineers start using them, so hopefully the next company I work with won't have some terribly complicated and unusable graphql but just protobufs.
- OJFord 5y agoThe original, significantly less sensational/PR-y and more appropriately mundane title is 'An update on our fundraising'.
- mbrodersen 5y agoYet another non-business grabbing $ from clueless investors. Surely there must be a word for the “we are grabbing $ from clueless investors” business model? WeWork is the poster child for that one.
- bern4444 5y agoThere is a word, it's fraud.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- kentonv 5y agoI mean... I'm one of the investors... I'm also the former maintainer of Protobuf and former startup founder myself... but I could be clueless, yeah.
- tlackemann 5y agoWith all respect, I hope you don't have a lot of capital locked in this. Who is this company targeting? Google? My company uses gRPC and it's an absolute nightmare but not so much to the point where we'd use a company like this to add on MORE costs to our infrastructure. It baffles me people choose buzzword technology because "ex-googler" or whatever when 99% of companies that choose it will NEVER hit the scale it was meant for. Best of luck to the sales team. They'll be the driving force I'm sure. REST is fine for 99% of companies. Long live REST.
- kentonv 5y agoI don't see Buf's play as being about scale or performance, but rather developer experience. I think that that with the right tooling, the developer experience of strong schemas with code generators can far surpass JSON/REST. If that happens then the performance/scalability benefit is just a bonus. Will people pay for it? That's not my area of expertise. But, I would note that Vagrant started out as a collection of Ruby scripts for wrangling existing VM products, which probably few people imagined would be something people would pay for. And just this morning, Hashicorp went public at a market cap of $18.5B. It is possible to build a business around developer tools. Not easy, certainly, but possible. > I hope you don't have a lot of capital locked in this Like any intelligent angel investor, I always assume I'll lose 100% of my investment and size them appropriately.
- 4kelly 5y agoI can highly vouch for Bufs protobuf linter and breaking change detector [1]. It’s open source. IMO. Generating gRPC code in multiple languages is pretty tedious setup and maintain. Buf has the potential to replace / free up a lot of time for a small team of people maintaining this sort of thing in house. - person who helps manage a protobuf monorepo. [1] https://docs.buf.build/tour/detect-breaking-changes https://docs.buf.build/tour/detect-breaking-changes
- digitailor 5y agoA case study of the pandemic speed of capital: May 2020- $1M Pre-Seed Sept 2020- $3.7M Seed April 2021- $20.7M Series A Dec 2021- $68M Series B How can so many rounds be condensed so quickly for a business like this? Is the number of Homebrew downloads (37k as advertised on the home page) a metric that can lead to an 18 month ramp to Series B now? I think there's a trend at play here I'd love to hear more about.
- felipellrocha 5y agoWhile the rest of the world is in a depression, Tech is in a bubble due to a ton of money being shifted over here since there was nowhere else to go.
- catsarebetter 5y agoMaybe it's a lot more simple, like they have someone that's ridiculously good at raising venture capital, like the Posthog guys.
- kentonv 5y agoTBH not really. I've talked to the founder a few times. He doesn't want to put his name on things, as he's kind of a private person and really wants to direct the spotlight at his employees. But he's just an engineer who has spent a lot of time working with Protobufs, not a sales person at all. (Disclosure: I was the maintainer of Protobuf who put together the first open source release at Google, and I made a small investment in buf early on.)
- catsarebetter 5y agoOk now I'm pretty interested in this company: 1. Very technical founder at the bleeding edge of the field. 2. Many people against this idea Usually a sign there's something really good here... or at least something that is super non-obvious to most people. I'm curious to learn what I'm missing... mind if I reach out?
- 5y ago
- Hnrobert42 5y agoRaised that much at what valuation?
- onionisafruit 5y agoProbably $93M or more.
- Hnrobert42 5y agoIf raised at $93M, that would mean the investors now own 100% of the company.
- pixelgeek 5y agoTheir PR really puts me off. Makes me think the authors are sneering at everyone who uses JSON. And who says they get to deprecate anything?
- Guest42 5y agoIt reminds me a bit of academic papers whereby an author chooses a specific corner-case of a topic and then beats it up in a rather contrived manner.
- bfung 5y agoI’m not up-to-date with protobuf, but last time I reviewed it like 4 years ago, it still wasn’t consistent at describing schemas as well as avro, esp in describing schema changes. Good luck to buf.build to sell a revamped wsdl and getting everyone to adopt it.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- hn_throwaway_99 5y agoWhen shit like this happens, I just always think "I don't understand finance at all and never will." I read the company's primary blog blog post, https://buf.build/blog/api-design-is-stuck-in-the-past https://buf.build/blog/api-design-is-stuck-in-the-past, about "schema driven development" and agree with a lot of it. Which is why I'm a huge fan of GraphQL and related completely free open source libraries, where I define my API endpoints with a strongly typed yet easily evolvable schema, and auto-generate my Typescript types from my GraphQL definitions. $93 million dollars is just nuts to me.
- webinvest 5y agoAt some point that money will have to be paid back — with interest… but from where? It can’t be free forever.
- anonymouse008 5y agoI was just about to ask ‘what are the differences between this and GraphQL?’ Maybe tag on an AWS AppSync & DynamoDB, and you have pretty much all of this? And before anyone goes all ‘but what about Dropbox?’ when scrutinizing this idea... Dropbox was never really made for technical people, this is squarely at people who know what JSON means, so technical.
- xyzzy_plugh 5y ago> Which is why I'm a huge fan of GraphQL and related completely free open source libraries I don't understand this comparison. Apollo raised $130M this past summer -- doesn't seem that different to TFA. Is that also nuts to you? The Protocol Buffers and gRPC ecosystem are also completely free open source libraries. Replace GraphQL with Protobuf and your post is still correct.
- hn_throwaway_99 5y ago> Apollo raised $130M this past summer -- doesn't seem that different to TFA. Is that also nuts to you? Yes, absolutely. I love the Apollo open source libs, and I can currently see how many customers would choose to pay for their services, but yes, I think $130 million is also nuts. Note I did preface my comment with "I don't understand finance at all and never will." so I'm certainly not saying I'm right here.
- aogaili 5y ago$93M..oh no, soon we will be flooded with ads and Steve Jobs like keynotes on why Rest sucks, I thought we were done with those after GraphQL hype slowed down, I guess not..please give it a...rest.
- ChuckMcM 5y agoWow, “Oh look, we’re going to re-invent the wheel for what is at least the third time.” When I worked at Google I sat down one day across from one of the gRPC engineering leads who was talking about the things they were doing for the then current generation of gRPC. I asked if I could ask some questions about it and they agreed and then dissected their design in half a dozen ways that would fail in both non-important but irritating ways, and in critical ways at scale. They were amazed at I had thought about this topic so deeply as it was all “state of the art” and I was, nominally, “old.” I pointed out that I had been the ONC RPC architect at Sun in the ‘80s during the first RPC wars and while the implementations had change, fundamentally messaging as a form of procedure call has some fundamentally bad properties. These challenges manifest in all aspects of RPC, from marshaling data, to rendezvousing, to delivery reliability and guarantees. Andy Birrell at DEC SRC and Leslie Lamport had written dozens of papers looking at these challenges in small systems and large. There was literally decades of solid research that the engineer in front of me at the cafeteria that day was re-discovering from first principles. RPC protocols from Sun, DEC, Microsoft, OSI, SOAP, the IETF, and the Open Group have run at this problem again and come up with different solutions that each have their own set of warts. Good for some things, not great for others. But at this point there are enough options at this point. What is missing from Buf’s material is what I might call the “Chesterson’s fence” material that dives into why all of these previous versions were insufficient and how their new version of gRPC will solve all those problems without adding new wrinkles. I think it is great that they are trying to improve the state of the art, I would feel better about it if they also demonstrated they understood what had come before.
- kentonv 5y agoNote that Buf is building tooling around Protobuf/gRPC, not replacing them. Maybe I'm just another clueless millennial developer who doesn't understand the history of the 80's or whatever, but I've never been able to understand this claim that RPC is broken. There's a lot of assertions that everyone knows RPC was broken because smart people in the 80's said so but... no one has ever been able to give me a concrete reason why. RPC, at least as I've always known it, really just boils down to request/response protocols. You send a request, you get a response. While this is admittedly not the only possible networking pattern, it is the dominant one across almost all distributed systems I've worked with. HTTP itself is request/response -- it's basically the same thing. All gRPC and Protobuf are doing that is different from HTTP is they're using a binary protocol based on explicitly-defined schemas. The protobuf compiler will take your schemas and generate convenient framework code for you, so you don't have to waste your time on boilerplate HTTP and parsing. And the binary encoding is faster and more compact than text-based encoding like JSON or XML. But this is all convenience and optimization, not fundamentally different on a conceptual level. Neither HTTP nor RPC protocols have ever pretended to solve higher-level distributed systems concerns of fault tolerance, network partitions, reliable delivery, etc. Those are things you build on top. You need a basic mechanism to send messages before you can do any of that. What, exactly, is the magical non-RPC approach of the 80's that we're all missing? Can you explain the alternative? EDIT: Also, like, the entirety of Google is built out of services that RPC to each other, but the 80's called and said that's wrong? How am I supposed to take this seriously?
- ghostwriter 5y agohttps://reasonablypolymorphic.com/blog/protos-are-wrong/index.html https://reasonablypolymorphic.com/blog/protos-are-wrong/inde... For those who still want / need binary protocols and schemas, look at FlatBuffers or Cap'n Proto instead. At least they are capable of representing domain structures properly.
- kentonv 5y agoSorry, I'm the author of Cap'n Proto and I think that article is full of shit. My previous commentary: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18190005 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18190005
- ghostwriter 5y agoThanks for Cap'n Proto. It's better than ProtoBuf, but I prefer FlatBuffers even more. I think the article is clearly indicating the issues that a wider community of conventional type systems in their mainstream languages is not fully aware of. And I disagree with your comments. Firstly, I don't like that you are labelling the author of the article as a "PL design theorist who doesn't have a clue" (my interpretation applied): > his article appears to be written by a programming language design theorist who, unfortunately, does not understand (or, perhaps, does not value) practical software engineering. I'm not the author, but they mention their prior industrial experience with protobufs at Google, among other unnamed places. I'm not a PL theorist either, and I see that you don't fully understand the problems of composability, compatibility, and versioning and are too eager to dismiss them based on your prior experience with inferior type systems. And here's why I think it is the case: > > This is especially true when it comes to protocols, because in a distributed system, you cannot update both sides of a protocol simultaneously. I have found that type theorists tend to promote "version negotiation" schemes where the two sides agree on one rigid protocol to follow, but this is extremely painful in practice: you end up needing to maintain parallel code paths, leading to ugly and hard-to-test code. Inevitably, developers are pushed towards hacks in order to avoid protocol changes, which makes things worse. You are conflating your experience with particular conventional tooling with a general availability of superior type systems and toolings out there. There's a high demand in utilising their properties in protocol designs today, where most of the currently popular protocols are hampering type systems for no good reason (no productivity gain, no performance gain, no resource utilisation gain). Version negotiation is not the only option available to a protocol designer. It is possible to use implicit-for-client and explicit-for-developer strategies to schema migration. It is also possible to semi-automate inference of those strategies. Example [1] > This seems to miss the point of optional fields. Optional fields are not primarily about nullability but about compatibility. Protobuf's single most important feature is the ability to add new fields over time while maintaining compatibility. There are at least two ways to achieve compatibility, and the optional fields that expand a domain type to the least common denominator of all encompassing possibilities is the wrong solution to this. Schema evolution via unions, versioning, and migrations is the proper approach that allows for strict resolution of compatibility issues with a level of granularity (distinct code paths) you like. > Real-world practice has also shown that quite often, fields that originally seemed to be "required" turn out to be optional over time, hence the "required considered harmful" manifesto. In practice, you want to declare all fields optional to give yourself maximum flexibility for change. This is false. In practice I want a schema versioning and deprecation policies, and not ever-growing domain expansion to the blob of all-optional data. > It's that way because the "oneof" pattern long-predates the "oneof" language construct. A "oneof" is actually syntax sugar for a bunch of "optional" fields where exactly one is expected to be filled in. this is not true either, and it doesn't matter what pattern predates which other pattern. Tagged unions are neither a language construct nor a syntax sugar, it's a property of Type Algebra where you have union- and product-compositions. Languages that implement Type Algebra don't do it to just add another fancy construct, they do it to benefit from mathematical foundations of these concepts. > How do you make this change without breaking compatibility? you version it, and migrate over time at your own pace without bothering your clients too often [1] [1] https://github.com/typeable/schematic#migrations https://github.com/typeable/schematic#migrations
- rickstanley 5y agoThe "™" symbol is so small I though it was dirt and tried to remove it. Lol.