This is a sales pitch for Render more than anything else.
It's a managed platform that handles some of the infrastructure for you. That's fine.
However, it's hardly revolutionary, and this blog post certainly doesn't illuminate any "not-so-hidden costs." Further, it's more of an indictment of Kubernetes than it is AWS.
We had to change the title to reflect HN guidelines:
> If the title includes the name of the site, please take it out, because the site name will be displayed after the link.
I agree with the Kubernetes indictment, but at this point, AWS and company go hand-in-hand with Kubernetes. They have PaaS products that rarely cater to app developers, and DevOps remains a necessity, Kubernetes or otherwise.
As we grow, our goal remains the same: empower developers and businesses to ship better products faster by eliminating DevOps. We’re working to end the tyranny of complexity forced on developers by cloud providers who’d rather sell certifications than focus on developer productivity.
I am not sure Render solves this problem. By providing a marketplace for more complete stack deployment?
I work daily with a client who has a profitable SaaS on Heroku and for them it’s cost-effective but I have another client with more cost constraints that I deployed on Render and I’ve very much enjoyed its simple dashboard (and performance is great even on entry-level instances). Looking forward to the opportunity to convince a customer with some bigger services to deploy a lot more on Render.
(Render founder/post author) Thanks. We already have features Heroku apps don't [1]; with many more features in the pipeline, it'll only get easier to convince your customers even if you ignore the huge cost difference.
I remember discovering Heroku while I was in grad school in 2014. I was learning how to use AWS...which in a way was a lot simpler back then. But I was working on different kinds of workloads and more focused on learning Hadoop so it didn't seem that useful to me and I kind of, disdained things that were "too simple." Seeing it again several years later it seemed a lot more useful to deploy webapps for dev projects but there didn't seem to be a way for us to leverage in in prod. Needed much more control and capability to run complex apps. Like, I was setting up ELK stack and I couldn't see how to integrate so I just...stopped thinking about Heroku, lol.
Content marketing, which is not off-the-mark. A lot of new-age cloud companies have sprung up in the wake of AWS/Azure/GCP's move to woo in more enterprises and thereby making devops a multi-million dollar cost-center for multiple companies. If anyone could automate away all that devops (fly.io / render / repl.it / railway.app / vercel / cloudflare workers / deno) then they stand to make meaningful inroads towards replacing these incumbents.
The biggest things ended up being Managed Redis, APAC regions, and SSH access, all of which would be available later this year. We'll likely start working on object storage early next year.
Honestly AWS has been a breeze for me and my team to setup and use. Now that we've been freed from the clutches of the Corporate IT Infrastructure team our productivity has been soaring while our costs have been nosediving. Yeah AWS isn't free, but it sure beats the alternative of Corporate IT Infrastructure and managing (and paying for) on-site licenses. For us AWS has been faster, cheaper, better! Obviously YMMV.
It's a managed platform that handles some of the infrastructure for you. That's fine.
However, it's hardly revolutionary, and this blog post certainly doesn't illuminate any "not-so-hidden costs." Further, it's more of an indictment of Kubernetes than it is AWS.