4 ms·

You pretty much just described Render. https://render.com https://render.com It's not perfect, and there is probably a point in time for a project where you'll

You pretty much just described Render. https://render.com https://render.com It's not perfect, and there is probably a point in time for a project where you'll need to evaluate other options, but I haven't found much that's better for small-scale stuff if you don't want to think too hard.

samhw 5y ago
That's fantastic! I'll have to take a look. Thanks for showing me. I was aware of Heroku, but this seems like the modern equivalent which I had in mind. (I do think you could likely go even simpler, though - there's a whole spectrum of complexity which could accommodate different services at each point.) Edit: Apropos of "there's a point in time where you'll need to evaluate other options": I think a good selling point would be a well-designed flow for 'ejecting' to a self-hosted or AWS/GCP environment. Yeah, yeah, it's not good for lock-in, but by the exact same token it would be a strong selling point. Done well, you could assuage the "we may as well get it out of the way now" concerns by saying that you'll make it easier to set up shop on AWS.
- eropple 5y ago
  You could go simpler than Render, and some folks do--but you go simpler at the cost of drastically reducing the value of a thing for whole categories of non-toy projects. For example, if you want to host a static thing there are a lot of pretty easy options, but the second you need something as foreign to the "JAMstack ideal" as "a datastore" like "for a blog with comments" now you're in multiple control panels and you're shuttling secrets around and you're confronted with paying multiple companies just to launch a blog and the whole thing physically hurts. Some mild complexity in deploy (and it is mild, a render.yaml file in your repo's super easy) comes from having the options to actually do things, I think.
- cldellow 5y ago
  I've been running a SaaS on Render for about a year now. In past lives, I managed ~$50k/mo of AWS spend for one company and $1k/mo of Heroku spend for another. Render's great for letting us just focus on the app. There are things I want them to improve, but I'm confident they'll get there eventually.
  - anurag 5y ago
    Lots of improvements and additions planned for the coming months. Thank you for sticking with us.
anurag 5y ago
(Render founder) thanks for the mention. We have 50+ person companies running entirely on Render with zero devops engineers. The point at which you need to evaluate options is a lot further out than you'd expect (and continues to disappear into the distance).
- snerual 5y ago
  Hi Founder, I've been wanting to use render for a long time now at our startup, but last time I looked at your GDPR info it was lacking. We sell to public education institutes in the EU, so it is a make or break for us. We might not be your target customer in that case, but otherwise I would love to hear what is possible.
  - anurag 5y ago
    We already sign DPAs, but expect to see more public information on GDPR later this year.
- eropple 5y ago
  Hey dude. I've been very happy with the day-job stuff we run in Render, that's why I mentioned it. ;) If (devops hat on) you want baseline compute/storage, I think I could see running on Render long-term. Where I (speaking personally) get off the ride is when I start needing external stuff, and that's usually pronounced "AWS services". Stuff like SQS and SNS are still The Killer App for AWS for me, and while I was poking at Render for my most recent personal project, it was easier to put compute and data storage into Fargate/RDS and not have to think about multiple control planes. A seamless, please-not-Terraform way to cross-manage Render resources with other cloud options would be pretty killer. (Which is directly in tension with the discussions of simplicity here. Turns out cloud stuff is hard.)
  - anurag 5y ago
    Completely agreed on building/offering higher-level services like SQS, SNS, S3. We're only at ~10% of where I want the platform to be, which is also why we're hiring quite aggressively!

samhw 5y ago

That's fantastic! I'll have to take a look. Thanks for showing me. I was aware of Heroku, but this seems like the modern equivalent which I had in mind. (I do think you could likely go even simpler, though - there's a whole spectrum of complexity which could accommodate different services at each point.) Edit: Apropos of "there's a point in time where you'll need to evaluate other options": I think a good selling point would be a well-designed flow for 'ejecting' to a self-hosted or AWS/GCP environment. Yeah, yeah, it's not good for lock-in, but by the exact same token it would be a strong selling point. Done well, you could assuage the "we may as well get it out of the way now" concerns by saying that you'll make it easier to set up shop on AWS.

eropple 5y ago
You could go simpler than Render, and some folks do--but you go simpler at the cost of drastically reducing the value of a thing for whole categories of non-toy projects. For example, if you want to host a static thing there are a lot of pretty easy options, but the second you need something as foreign to the "JAMstack ideal" as "a datastore" like "for a blog with comments" now you're in multiple control panels and you're shuttling secrets around and you're confronted with paying multiple companies just to launch a blog and the whole thing physically hurts. Some mild complexity in deploy (and it is mild, a render.yaml file in your repo's super easy) comes from having the options to actually do things, I think.
cldellow 5y ago
I've been running a SaaS on Render for about a year now. In past lives, I managed ~$50k/mo of AWS spend for one company and $1k/mo of Heroku spend for another. Render's great for letting us just focus on the app. There are things I want them to improve, but I'm confident they'll get there eventually.
- anurag 5y ago
  Lots of improvements and additions planned for the coming months. Thank you for sticking with us.

anurag 5y ago

(Render founder) thanks for the mention. We have 50+ person companies running entirely on Render with zero devops engineers. The point at which you need to evaluate options is a lot further out than you'd expect (and continues to disappear into the distance).

snerual 5y ago
Hi Founder, I've been wanting to use render for a long time now at our startup, but last time I looked at your GDPR info it was lacking. We sell to public education institutes in the EU, so it is a make or break for us. We might not be your target customer in that case, but otherwise I would love to hear what is possible.
- anurag 5y ago
  We already sign DPAs, but expect to see more public information on GDPR later this year.
eropple 5y ago
Hey dude. I've been very happy with the day-job stuff we run in Render, that's why I mentioned it. ;) If (devops hat on) you want baseline compute/storage, I think I could see running on Render long-term. Where I (speaking personally) get off the ride is when I start needing external stuff, and that's usually pronounced "AWS services". Stuff like SQS and SNS are still The Killer App for AWS for me, and while I was poking at Render for my most recent personal project, it was easier to put compute and data storage into Fargate/RDS and not have to think about multiple control planes. A seamless, please-not-Terraform way to cross-manage Render resources with other cloud options would be pretty killer. (Which is directly in tension with the discussions of simplicity here. Turns out cloud stuff is hard.)
- anurag 5y ago
  Completely agreed on building/offering higher-level services like SQS, SNS, S3. We're only at ~10% of where I want the platform to be, which is also why we're hiring quite aggressively!