4 ms·

(I'm Render's founder) What should we build next, HN?

by anurag 2y ago

raywu 2y ago
Congrats on the raise and building something people love! If I could make a suggestion - make it clear you are the founder of Render instead of using these parentheses “(Render founder)”!
rvz 2y ago
Buy Replicate [0]. [0] https://replicate.com/ https://replicate.com/
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- scirob 2y ago
  lol while your at it could you please also buy https://rendernetwork.com/ https://rendernetwork.com/ just becuase the name conflict gets confusing :)
christophilus 2y ago
We currently use Render, Wasabi, and BunnyCDN. It’s a great combo. If you offered a low-price object store with a CDN layer, that would be swank.
bambax 2y ago
You could start by explaining what you do. I still have no idea (better Heroku?) and judging by the comments here I'm not alone...
- theonething 2y ago
  They're a PaaS provider. Why the hell is that so hard to understand?
serjester 2y ago
It’s probably low margin but it’d be nice to see object storage. We host almost everything on render, and use digital ocean for storing assets. It leaves a ton to be desired - I wish it had simple object versioning, backups, even a nicer search tool would be awesome.
- anurag 2y ago
  Object storage is a major missing piece. Stay tuned.
scirob 2y ago
Why not compete a bit with Supabase its all opensource outside the OAuth integration I'm sure you can code it fast. I love the workflow of coding frontend and just changing the database as I am thinking of what data model i need and then https://docs.postgrest.org/en/v12/ https://docs.postgrest.org/en/v12/ automatically changes the API. (One could also say firebase competition but I highly prefer the postgres oriented supabase strategy)
Sytten 2y ago
Honestly as a long term customer please polish what you have. By that I mean: - Teams are still the only proper way to segment environments and access control. Yet you charge team member, I am still mad about that because even after 1+ year we need to use multiple teams. - Metrics are still locked to your platform, I want to use my telemetry provider because you guys dont have alerts, dashboard creation, etc. - Control over the subnets, we use tailscale to give access to private services right now its all 10.205.X.X and we dont control it - Allow us to turn off cloudflare. You said during last outage that being reliant on cloudflare was an issue and we are yet 1+ later without progress. I could go on. I do like the product and simplicity but it is lacking control when you actually outgrow the "get it out the door fast" phase. I am not even sure one could pass an ISO27001 by being on Render.
- scirob 2y ago
  I agree here. Render is nice now, not bloated.
- anurag 2y ago
  * You can now block private network traffic from crossing environment boundaries (https://render.com/docs/projects#blocking-cross-environment-traffic https://render.com/docs/projects#blocking-cross-environment-...). We also just launched an invite-only feature that creates a high-level Organizational structure with multiple teams, where each team member is only charged once. * Otel exports are in development and should be live in early access in a few weeks! * Heard on subnet IPs * There's ongoing work to remove a major Cloudflare dependency; it should also go live in a few weeks. We'll keep polishing and pushing the envelope on control and flexibility. Thanks for being a vocal customer.
  - Sytten 2y ago
    Thanks for the reply. I never understood the appeal of the network traffic split since it didnt come with user access control. Not everybody in a team needs access to all environments and even within an environment not everybody needs access to every service and/or secrets of those services. Couple of other things while I do have you: - More control on the instance sizing similar to how you have us control of the postgres instances - A proper write-only secrets system ala AWS Secret Manager. The current environment variables isn't passing an audit for sure if anybody on the team can log in and see them plaintext Your support team is really good I do want to say, it is probably the one thing that kept me a customer.
mrdependable 2y ago
I'm trying to switch to using preview environments right now to optimize my git workflow and it is a bit of a bummer that I can't just assign preview environments their own environment group. I am still trying to wrap my head around the best way to do this because I have a lot of environment variables. I also have my object storage with Digital Ocean at the moment. Would love to have that all under one roof.
- anurag 2y ago
  Preview environments need some polish. We'll get there.
woodhull 2y ago
We launched our company on Render. It was great for going from zero to one very quickly but we had many problems and ended up migrating to AWS as we scaled. * Poor visibility into detailed metrics, especially when problems happened in the render load balancer / routing mesh. We had a specific issue where a small number of requests were failing somewhere in render's infrastructure before reaching our application, and at the time there was no visibility to allow customers to know about requests that timed out or failed within render's infrastructure rather than our application. We collaborated with your team to surface and replicate the issue, but it was frustrating. I had a very good set of conversations with a product manager on your team about what we needed and why it was important in early 2024. * At the time, the hosted postgres implementation was immature. I think this is an area you've already improved dramatically. * Maybe you could add support for something like AWS PrivateLink so customers can run parts of their workloads on AWS securely over a private network. This would be a neat way to allow customers to stay on Render longer as their needs grow.
- jboggan 2y ago
  I'm currently building on Render and I concur with the third point. Render is great right now but I know I'm going to need a more sophisticated backend data environment and analytics workloads in the future.
- anurag 2y ago
  We launched HTTP request logs early in 2024, which would have made things easier to debug. Similarly, we're launching full OpenTelemetry exports in a few weeks. Deep observability is critical for more complex environments, and things are improving dramatically on this front just as they have on Postgres. We already support AWS PrivateLink! Reach out to support@render.com.
wslh 2y ago
Is the Render token [1] somehow related to Render? [1] https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/render/ https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/render/
- anurag 2y ago
  No. It's a sad name clash.
theodoretliu 2y ago
Was loving the ease of deployment on render but had to move off for lack of BAA and HIPAA compliance. Any timeline for support?
- anurag 2y ago
  We're working towards HIPAA compliance this year, but I don't have an ETA.
- felipeccastro 2y ago
  Our team considered Render but dropped for the same reason. We’re looking into Aptible right now, not as well known but seems focused on HIPAA compliance.
MrAlex94 2y ago
IPv6 support would be ideal :) https://feedback.render.com/features/p/ipv6-support https://feedback.render.com/features/p/ipv6-support
3m 2y ago
Object storage would be good.
chachra 2y ago
Scale to 0 services. Might mean less money for Render but would be awesome. Gets a lot of side projects hosted on fly because if it. Partnership with Neon would be great too, I run 6 dbs there for $69 with auto scaling (and scales to 0 too if needed for non-prod envs). Render would be 3-4x that price for those many dbs.
chachra 2y ago
Transactional email service. S3 backed object storage (too risky to use anything else or even learn anything else for it).
kshahkshah 2y ago
We had to leave Render because there was no support for FAAS. Love Render though! Congrats on the round!
Tankenstein 2y ago
Bring more must-have parts of the stack into the offering: - Object storage - Metrics (managed prometheus + grafana? or preferrably your own lightweight version, like your log system, which mostly gets the job done)
solumunus 2y ago
Please, please open up a London region. I would switch immediately.

(I'm Render's founder) What should we build next, HN?

by anurag 2y ago

(I'm Render's founder) What should we build next, HN?

Congrats on the raise and building something people love! If I could make a suggestion - make it clear you are the founder of Render instead of using these parentheses “(Render founder)”!

rvz 2y ago

Buy Replicate [0]. [0] https://replicate.com/ https://replicate.com/

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
scirob 2y ago
lol while your at it could you please also buy https://rendernetwork.com/ https://rendernetwork.com/ just becuase the name conflict gets confusing :)

christophilus 2y ago

We currently use Render, Wasabi, and BunnyCDN. It’s a great combo. If you offered a low-price object store with a CDN layer, that would be swank.

bambax 2y ago

You could start by explaining what you do. I still have no idea (better Heroku?) and judging by the comments here I'm not alone...

theonething 2y ago
They're a PaaS provider. Why the hell is that so hard to understand?

serjester 2y ago

It’s probably low margin but it’d be nice to see object storage. We host almost everything on render, and use digital ocean for storing assets. It leaves a ton to be desired - I wish it had simple object versioning, backups, even a nicer search tool would be awesome.

anurag 2y ago
Object storage is a major missing piece. Stay tuned.

scirob 2y ago

Why not compete a bit with Supabase its all opensource outside the OAuth integration I'm sure you can code it fast. I love the workflow of coding frontend and just changing the database as I am thinking of what data model i need and then https://docs.postgrest.org/en/v12/ https://docs.postgrest.org/en/v12/ automatically changes the API. (One could also say firebase competition but I highly prefer the postgres oriented supabase strategy)

Sytten 2y ago

Honestly as a long term customer please polish what you have. By that I mean: - Teams are still the only proper way to segment environments and access control. Yet you charge team member, I am still mad about that because even after 1+ year we need to use multiple teams. - Metrics are still locked to your platform, I want to use my telemetry provider because you guys dont have alerts, dashboard creation, etc. - Control over the subnets, we use tailscale to give access to private services right now its all 10.205.X.X and we dont control it - Allow us to turn off cloudflare. You said during last outage that being reliant on cloudflare was an issue and we are yet 1+ later without progress. I could go on. I do like the product and simplicity but it is lacking control when you actually outgrow the "get it out the door fast" phase. I am not even sure one could pass an ISO27001 by being on Render.

scirob 2y ago
I agree here. Render is nice now, not bloated.
anurag 2y ago
* You can now block private network traffic from crossing environment boundaries (https://render.com/docs/projects#blocking-cross-environment-traffic https://render.com/docs/projects#blocking-cross-environment-...). We also just launched an invite-only feature that creates a high-level Organizational structure with multiple teams, where each team member is only charged once. * Otel exports are in development and should be live in early access in a few weeks! * Heard on subnet IPs * There's ongoing work to remove a major Cloudflare dependency; it should also go live in a few weeks. We'll keep polishing and pushing the envelope on control and flexibility. Thanks for being a vocal customer.
- Sytten 2y ago
  Thanks for the reply. I never understood the appeal of the network traffic split since it didnt come with user access control. Not everybody in a team needs access to all environments and even within an environment not everybody needs access to every service and/or secrets of those services. Couple of other things while I do have you: - More control on the instance sizing similar to how you have us control of the postgres instances - A proper write-only secrets system ala AWS Secret Manager. The current environment variables isn't passing an audit for sure if anybody on the team can log in and see them plaintext Your support team is really good I do want to say, it is probably the one thing that kept me a customer.

mrdependable 2y ago

I'm trying to switch to using preview environments right now to optimize my git workflow and it is a bit of a bummer that I can't just assign preview environments their own environment group. I am still trying to wrap my head around the best way to do this because I have a lot of environment variables. I also have my object storage with Digital Ocean at the moment. Would love to have that all under one roof.

anurag 2y ago
Preview environments need some polish. We'll get there.

woodhull 2y ago

We launched our company on Render. It was great for going from zero to one very quickly but we had many problems and ended up migrating to AWS as we scaled. * Poor visibility into detailed metrics, especially when problems happened in the render load balancer / routing mesh. We had a specific issue where a small number of requests were failing somewhere in render's infrastructure before reaching our application, and at the time there was no visibility to allow customers to know about requests that timed out or failed within render's infrastructure rather than our application. We collaborated with your team to surface and replicate the issue, but it was frustrating. I had a very good set of conversations with a product manager on your team about what we needed and why it was important in early 2024. * At the time, the hosted postgres implementation was immature. I think this is an area you've already improved dramatically. * Maybe you could add support for something like AWS PrivateLink so customers can run parts of their workloads on AWS securely over a private network. This would be a neat way to allow customers to stay on Render longer as their needs grow.

jboggan 2y ago
I'm currently building on Render and I concur with the third point. Render is great right now but I know I'm going to need a more sophisticated backend data environment and analytics workloads in the future.
anurag 2y ago
We launched HTTP request logs early in 2024, which would have made things easier to debug. Similarly, we're launching full OpenTelemetry exports in a few weeks. Deep observability is critical for more complex environments, and things are improving dramatically on this front just as they have on Postgres. We already support AWS PrivateLink! Reach out to support@render.com.

wslh 2y ago

Is the Render token [1] somehow related to Render? [1] https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/render/ https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/render/

anurag 2y ago
No. It's a sad name clash.

theodoretliu 2y ago

Was loving the ease of deployment on render but had to move off for lack of BAA and HIPAA compliance. Any timeline for support?

anurag 2y ago
We're working towards HIPAA compliance this year, but I don't have an ETA.
felipeccastro 2y ago
Our team considered Render but dropped for the same reason. We’re looking into Aptible right now, not as well known but seems focused on HIPAA compliance.

MrAlex94 2y ago

IPv6 support would be ideal :) https://feedback.render.com/features/p/ipv6-support https://feedback.render.com/features/p/ipv6-support

3m 2y ago

Object storage would be good.

chachra 2y ago

Scale to 0 services. Might mean less money for Render but would be awesome. Gets a lot of side projects hosted on fly because if it. Partnership with Neon would be great too, I run 6 dbs there for $69 with auto scaling (and scales to 0 too if needed for non-prod envs). Render would be 3-4x that price for those many dbs.

chachra 2y ago

Transactional email service. S3 backed object storage (too risky to use anything else or even learn anything else for it).

kshahkshah 2y ago

We had to leave Render because there was no support for FAAS. Love Render though! Congrats on the round!

Tankenstein 2y ago

Bring more must-have parts of the stack into the offering: - Object storage - Metrics (managed prometheus + grafana? or preferrably your own lightweight version, like your log system, which mostly gets the job done)

solumunus 2y ago

Please, please open up a London region. I would switch immediately.