I have been following this space alot.
Heroku like deployment spaces have exploded recently partly because people miss that experience, partly because buildpack is opensource[1], partly because we have gone through a techshift where it is pretty easy to emulate that.
There are two broad categories - 1. Dokku's of the world, one VM (very recently tried adding multi node) and then more recently getporter.dev[2] and okteto[3] of the world that is trying to replicate heroku on kubernetes.
One of things, I noticed is that, It looks really cool at first look but every organisation has their own complexity in deploying stuff. It is an integration hell, you have to provide white glove treatment to all customers and eventually you have a hard time scaling.
We tried it too, and what we noticed if you have to go an enterprise and sell, you start doing leaky abstraction. It works really well for early stage startups but once they have the money you prefer something more customizable and robust solution.
This project looks cool. I do not want to discourage anyone but again, it is a red ocean out there.
The problem is the layering of the abstractions. Having PaaS on top of Kubernetes in a way that you move down to a more powerful primitive is going to be the most scalable.
What happened in the public cloud space was a disparate set of services which made the choices really costly. Azure went in heavy on PaaS while AWS was focused on VMs. The easy adoption and migration was on AWS. K8s seems like a reasonable abstraction that reduces the cost of these decisions because people seem to agree that K8s is a reasonable base.
Being able to slide on a compatible PaaS layer shouldn't negate that K8s investment, and make it easier to adopt for some organizations, or parts of those organizations. But, I wouldn't argue that we are the point where that layer is mature.
I do not agree with you. PaaS abstraction becomes super leaky on top kubernetes as you start solving real world problems.
That is one the first mistakes newly formed platform teams in a company makes, abstracting infrastructure. Happy flow of PaaS on kubernetes is great. It is magical to certain extent. But negative flows is a really mess. The customer no clue why certain things do not work and you as a engineer had no clue that this would have happened.
Secondly, the amount breaking changes you have deal with as a result of abstraction is crazy. People pushing code does not care. It is basically moving complexity from one place to another.
> The following functionality has been implemented: Deployment and Service annotations, Domain proxy support via the Nginx Ingress Controller, Environment variables, Letsencrypt SSL Certificate integration via CertManager, Pod Disruption Budgets, Resource limits and reservations (reservations == kubernetes requests), Zero-downtime deploys via Deployment healthchecks, Traffic to non-web containers (via a configurable list)
We're[1] in a similar space and our winning strategy has been to provide white-glove onboarding to get our customers environment up and running. It's part of doing something that doesn't scale (easily) but it also allows us to figure out what else we can automate away to increase pace on these onboarding.
The product looks great. I don't want to discourage you guys, I am failing to see a moat as compared to you guys and lets say getporter or others in the spaces. Funny enough you guys are also YC company.
Product with a high touchpoint I think does not scale this early on as a company.
For reference, Porter as a product is doing great because I think they have invested a lot in building a community. I think that works to certain extent as at scale community helps each other.
But, just beware of the fact that market cap is actually pretty small. You have enterprise competition from VMWare Tanzu and others. On the cloud space, you have digitalocean's app deployment thing, AWS has app runner. I have at least seen over 20 companies doing pretty much the same thing. Just a thought.
One of things, I noticed is that, It looks really cool at first look but every organisation has their own complexity in deploying stuff. It is an integration hell, you have to provide white glove treatment to all customers and eventually you have a hard time scaling. We tried it too, and what we noticed if you have to go an enterprise and sell, you start doing leaky abstraction. It works really well for early stage startups but once they have the money you prefer something more customizable and robust solution.
This project looks cool. I do not want to discourage anyone but again, it is a red ocean out there.
[1] https://buildpacks.io/
[2] https://www.getporter.dev/
[3] https://okteto.com/