4 ms·

I gotta say, reading this I have no idea what Render actually does or how it's different from AWS or Heroku. They say they've threaded the needle between the tw

by tyre 2y ago

I gotta say, reading this I have no idea what Render actually does or how it's different from AWS or Heroku. They say they've threaded the needle between the two to provide a new way of deploying infra, but what that is…who knows! Naturally a paragraph on AI. At some point companies lose the ability to say, "We are X. It used to be that Y, which had issues of A, B, C. Instead, X does Z, so $USERS can now D, E, F." Where the letters are specific (not empty words like "innovative"). As they grow, these companies add additional products, which is one reason I think they lose this. That's okay! Add one or two sentences (max) that say, "Once we solved Z, we kept building to offer L, M, and N. We expanded from serving $USERS to supporting $EXPANDED_USERS who need O and P." It's kind of wild how rare that clarity of communication is. Stripe still does a pretty good job despite the _huge_ range of products, complexity, customer profiles, abstractions, and interfaces. You can definitely tell when companies are either parroting what they've read other splash pages say or are using LLMs to say a bunch of empty platitudes. Good writing is really fking hard.

anurag 2y ago
Hello fellow Xtripe! This blog post wasn't meant to focus on differentiation, but you might find this useful: https://render.com/docs/render-vs-heroku-comparison https://render.com/docs/render-vs-heroku-comparison
- JTyQZSnP3cQGa8B 2y ago
  It's not helping me. All I understand is that you provide some stuff for Docker, static web sites, and databases. That's good, but it seems very specific. So specific that, as a former devops, I don't understand why you could be useful to me or why I would need your help.
  - anurag 2y ago
    We need to improve our product marketing! Render focuses exclusively on application engineers who need to run things in the cloud without worrying about devops; this also means we don't focus on the needs of devops engineers.
    - verdverm 2y ago
      It also means that when an application reaches a certain maturity or complexity, they have to leave platforms like Render to clouds where they can do the things they need to operate with efficiency. There is a tradeoff point. Platforms like Render are small team efficient, clouds are organization efficient
      - anurag 2y ago
        This is the narrative we disagree with most people on and are focused on disproving: multiple unicorns have started and stayed on Render, and our platform continues to add capabilities as their needs become more complex.
        verdverm 2y ago
        Exceptions to the rule (some unicorns, a crude measure for tech needs) do not break the rule. If anything, the trend is shifting back to self-hosting instead of running on any vendor. If you add the same capabilities you end up becoming the cloud provider concept you wish to "disprove", and I would posit that feature creep reinforces the concept
        steve_adams_86 2y ago
        Which unicorns?
      - jacobsenscott 2y ago
        A lot of apps never grow to that size, and can run on services like render or heroku forever, saving millions of dollars in devops cost (the most expensive part of devops is the devops engineer). A good number of companies out there move to google scale infrastructure and spin up whole devops teams when they would be fine without all that out of fear of having to move later. That later might never come.
        verdverm 2y ago
        A good devops engineer or team will pay for itself, so it becomes an asset rather than a liability. A certain amount of scale or complexity forms a baseline. I get consulting / contracting gigs for this very reason, granted what I do goes beyond just cloud infra & costs, devops/dx as a philosophy rather than a job title. It is valuable to an organization to have some(one|people) thinking about these problems from a global & holistic view
  - scirob 2y ago
    nothing that you can't do in AWS but generally Render tries to do things in less clicks and have less advanced clicks for you to accidentally press. Thats pretty much it nothing fancy.
- tyre 2y ago
  Every announcement, _especially_ huge press events like fundraising, should be clear on value prop and differentiation. I’m a potential user. You had my eyeballs, but missed the opportunity to sell me. And if you can do it in 3–5 sentences, you can put that everywhere. It’s so, so, so important to repeat your message at every opportunity; particularly at moments, like fundraising announcements, where you’ll have access to new potential users (vs. something like a feature release where the readers are far more likely to be existing users.) Additionally, another group of readers here would be potential hires. They probably want to know why you’re different!
- dprotaso 2y ago
  Is Render still using Knative? https://render.com/blog/knative https://render.com/blog/knative ?
  - anurag 2y ago
    Not any more. We replaced it with our own code that did exactly what we needed it to do.
netswift 2y ago
I really love Render. AWS is too low level for me. Render helps us spin up new applications in a few clicks. Kind of like Vercel for backend. Might just be a skill issue but I can definitely see the value from using the product.
- ignoramous 2y ago
  > AWS is too low level for me We had good success with Lightsail; but then moved to Fly.io & the Cloudflare platform and spend ~zero time on sre & devops.
  - RainyDayTmrw 2y ago
    I'm curious what you use for a database on Fly.io. When I last looked into it, a proper managed database option was the last thing that they were missing from what I wanted.
    - SOLAR_FIELDS 2y ago
      I'm not skin in the game on either company but I know that they partnered with Supabase for awhile on this. I'm not sure if that partnership is ongoing or not.
    - alexeldeib 2y ago
      Supabase would be a good pick. Vercel and Cloudflare both do SQL DBs now too, curious how they are. Neon seemed interesting, haven’t heard much about them in a while. None of those integrated of course, but easier than going big cloud or self hosted
      - thrwaway223 2y ago
        Vercel SQL DB is just a thin wrapper (with added cost) on Neon
        leerob 2y ago
serjester 2y ago
We use Render for our startup and I think it’s major value add is the simple deployment story. We had a database go down for really strange reasons, and the render technical support was incredibly helpful to work with and resolved the issue in hours. The major cloud providers are quite intimidating to work with and frankly we have much bigger problems to spend our time on than (potentially) saving a couple grand a month. Heroku was nice but it’s been abandoned for years. Fly is a similar competitor but they seem to have monthly outages. We find Render simple, boring and dependable - for us that’s worth the premium they charge.
lamename 2y ago
Good writing is hard, but it's also very easy to just regurgitate patterns of nonsense buzzwords you see everywhere else. I've seen many people hear that and just nod their head. Sadly it convinces some.
RainyDayTmrw 2y ago
There's some anecdotal accounts that, through the mismanagement of its acquirer, Heroku is slowly dying after the acquisition. If Render so much as provides the Heroku experience at its peak, that would already be valuable, and many of us would already be happy. Of course, if Render directly says, "We're going to be like Heroku before it went off the rails," that's not compelling to media or investors. So, instead, they've got to fluff it up a bit with marketing buzz. Throwing in some AI won't hurt, either.
- didgeoridoo 2y ago
  Heroku was acquired in 2011, so to be fair it did take Salesforce quite a long time to screw it up.
- catlover76 2y ago
  [dead]
SOLAR_FIELDS 2y ago
Taken more charitably from the business' perspective, the playbook you outline that you wish businesses provided is outright giving away some of the R&D that they took to arrive at those conclusions, which has some nonzero value to competitors. I would love to go ask some incumbent exactly the playbook of what worked and what didn't on their voyage to the market so that I could just skip all the things that don't work
loktarogar 2y ago
I have a lot of data-heavy websites that are completely automated on Render. I don't need to care about them day to day. Render abstracts a lot of work away from me. Before this I used Heroku. Heroku basically filled the same role but nowadays it's less flexible and after all the issues I couldn't wait to get away from them. Render feels like a better Heroku for my specific needs.
ibash 2y ago
Modern heroku. The toolset is standard for web these days (eg docker, etc) but you don’t need to roll your own devops. It might be hard to understand the value prop because it seems like a commodity… but that’s exactly the value prop: a commodity that works well, is priced right, and you don’t need to worry about using some weird toolset or rolling your own infrastructure.
AutistiCoder 2y ago
Same. In 3-5 sentences, what specifically differentiates Render from, say, AWS Lambda? For example, how much money would I save from making the switch?

by tyre 2y ago

anurag 2y ago

Hello fellow Xtripe! This blog post wasn't meant to focus on differentiation, but you might find this useful: https://render.com/docs/render-vs-heroku-comparison https://render.com/docs/render-vs-heroku-comparison

JTyQZSnP3cQGa8B 2y ago
It's not helping me. All I understand is that you provide some stuff for Docker, static web sites, and databases. That's good, but it seems very specific. So specific that, as a former devops, I don't understand why you could be useful to me or why I would need your help.
- anurag 2y ago
  We need to improve our product marketing! Render focuses exclusively on application engineers who need to run things in the cloud without worrying about devops; this also means we don't focus on the needs of devops engineers.
  - verdverm 2y ago
    It also means that when an application reaches a certain maturity or complexity, they have to leave platforms like Render to clouds where they can do the things they need to operate with efficiency. There is a tradeoff point. Platforms like Render are small team efficient, clouds are organization efficient
    - anurag 2y ago
      This is the narrative we disagree with most people on and are focused on disproving: multiple unicorns have started and stayed on Render, and our platform continues to add capabilities as their needs become more complex.
      - verdverm 2y ago
        Exceptions to the rule (some unicorns, a crude measure for tech needs) do not break the rule. If anything, the trend is shifting back to self-hosting instead of running on any vendor. If you add the same capabilities you end up becoming the cloud provider concept you wish to "disprove", and I would posit that feature creep reinforces the concept
      - steve_adams_86 2y ago
        Which unicorns?
    - jacobsenscott 2y ago
      A lot of apps never grow to that size, and can run on services like render or heroku forever, saving millions of dollars in devops cost (the most expensive part of devops is the devops engineer). A good number of companies out there move to google scale infrastructure and spin up whole devops teams when they would be fine without all that out of fear of having to move later. That later might never come.
      - verdverm 2y ago
        A good devops engineer or team will pay for itself, so it becomes an asset rather than a liability. A certain amount of scale or complexity forms a baseline. I get consulting / contracting gigs for this very reason, granted what I do goes beyond just cloud infra & costs, devops/dx as a philosophy rather than a job title. It is valuable to an organization to have some(one|people) thinking about these problems from a global & holistic view
- scirob 2y ago
  nothing that you can't do in AWS but generally Render tries to do things in less clicks and have less advanced clicks for you to accidentally press. Thats pretty much it nothing fancy.
tyre 2y ago
Every announcement, _especially_ huge press events like fundraising, should be clear on value prop and differentiation. I’m a potential user. You had my eyeballs, but missed the opportunity to sell me. And if you can do it in 3–5 sentences, you can put that everywhere. It’s so, so, so important to repeat your message at every opportunity; particularly at moments, like fundraising announcements, where you’ll have access to new potential users (vs. something like a feature release where the readers are far more likely to be existing users.) Additionally, another group of readers here would be potential hires. They probably want to know why you’re different!
dprotaso 2y ago
Is Render still using Knative? https://render.com/blog/knative https://render.com/blog/knative ?
- anurag 2y ago
  Not any more. We replaced it with our own code that did exactly what we needed it to do.

netswift 2y ago

I really love Render. AWS is too low level for me. Render helps us spin up new applications in a few clicks. Kind of like Vercel for backend. Might just be a skill issue but I can definitely see the value from using the product.

ignoramous 2y ago
> AWS is too low level for me We had good success with Lightsail; but then moved to Fly.io & the Cloudflare platform and spend ~zero time on sre & devops.
- RainyDayTmrw 2y ago
  I'm curious what you use for a database on Fly.io. When I last looked into it, a proper managed database option was the last thing that they were missing from what I wanted.
  - SOLAR_FIELDS 2y ago
    I'm not skin in the game on either company but I know that they partnered with Supabase for awhile on this. I'm not sure if that partnership is ongoing or not.
  - alexeldeib 2y ago
    Supabase would be a good pick. Vercel and Cloudflare both do SQL DBs now too, curious how they are. Neon seemed interesting, haven’t heard much about them in a while. None of those integrated of course, but easier than going big cloud or self hosted
    - thrwaway223 2y ago
      Vercel SQL DB is just a thin wrapper (with added cost) on Neon
      - leerob 2y ago

serjester 2y ago

We use Render for our startup and I think it’s major value add is the simple deployment story. We had a database go down for really strange reasons, and the render technical support was incredibly helpful to work with and resolved the issue in hours. The major cloud providers are quite intimidating to work with and frankly we have much bigger problems to spend our time on than (potentially) saving a couple grand a month. Heroku was nice but it’s been abandoned for years. Fly is a similar competitor but they seem to have monthly outages. We find Render simple, boring and dependable - for us that’s worth the premium they charge.

lamename 2y ago

Good writing is hard, but it's also very easy to just regurgitate patterns of nonsense buzzwords you see everywhere else. I've seen many people hear that and just nod their head. Sadly it convinces some.

RainyDayTmrw 2y ago

There's some anecdotal accounts that, through the mismanagement of its acquirer, Heroku is slowly dying after the acquisition. If Render so much as provides the Heroku experience at its peak, that would already be valuable, and many of us would already be happy. Of course, if Render directly says, "We're going to be like Heroku before it went off the rails," that's not compelling to media or investors. So, instead, they've got to fluff it up a bit with marketing buzz. Throwing in some AI won't hurt, either.

didgeoridoo 2y ago
Heroku was acquired in 2011, so to be fair it did take Salesforce quite a long time to screw it up.
catlover76 2y ago
[dead]

SOLAR_FIELDS 2y ago

Taken more charitably from the business' perspective, the playbook you outline that you wish businesses provided is outright giving away some of the R&D that they took to arrive at those conclusions, which has some nonzero value to competitors. I would love to go ask some incumbent exactly the playbook of what worked and what didn't on their voyage to the market so that I could just skip all the things that don't work

loktarogar 2y ago

I have a lot of data-heavy websites that are completely automated on Render. I don't need to care about them day to day. Render abstracts a lot of work away from me. Before this I used Heroku. Heroku basically filled the same role but nowadays it's less flexible and after all the issues I couldn't wait to get away from them. Render feels like a better Heroku for my specific needs.

ibash 2y ago

Modern heroku. The toolset is standard for web these days (eg docker, etc) but you don’t need to roll your own devops. It might be hard to understand the value prop because it seems like a commodity… but that’s exactly the value prop: a commodity that works well, is priced right, and you don’t need to worry about using some weird toolset or rolling your own infrastructure.

AutistiCoder 2y ago

Same. In 3-5 sentences, what specifically differentiates Render from, say, AWS Lambda? For example, how much money would I save from making the switch?