[HN Gopher] Launch HN: Webiny (YC W21) - Open-source serverless ...
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Launch HN: Webiny (YC W21) - Open-source serverless framework with
a drop-in CMS
Hi, Sven and Pavel here - we're building a self-hosted, open-source
framework for developers that want to create serverless
applications and websites. After 10 years of running a web
development agency and delivering over 100 projects, we tried many
different approaches to building apps and websites. When we looked
at the patterns for most of the projects we delivered, it was
always a combination of custom business logic and a way to manage
content, like pages, news articles, and similar. Looking at the
options available on the market, we either had frameworks for
building the custom logic or ready-made CMS solutions for managing
the content. There was no combination for when we wanted to do
both. And this is one of the biggest pains we had. We would either
force custom logic inside a CMS and break things or make them hard
to maintain, or use a framework and take much longer to deliver a
project since we'd end up building a custom CMS and making the
whole thing more expensive to the client. On top of that, we were
just tired of constantly spinning up servers, managing container
images, worrying about uptime, network, and security issues, and
paying for resources we were not utilizing 100%. Looking for
options, we discovered serverless. The premise of not having
infrastructure to manage sounded really intriguing. Having fault-
tolerant resources that scale automatically when you need them with
consumption-based pricing that cost up to 80% less than virtual
machines sounded like the ideal solution...until we tried to build
something with it. It was almost impossible. All the existing
frameworks and CMS options are designed for a "server environment",
and couldn't be used to build solutions in a serverless
environment. The only tutorials available at that time covered how
to resize an image with a Lambda function. Besides that, serverless
requires a cognitive change of how you approach code and
infrastructure. In all those problems we saw an opportunity. Over
a course of a year, we built a framework that allows anyone to
quickly build serverless applications without battling all the
challenges that come with it. Things like rendering and caching
pages, optimizing the cold-start times, debugging function calls,
managing connections between functions and the database, CI/CD
setup, and many more. The framework comes with a GraphQL API, Admin
UI, ACL, CLI for deployment and scaffolding, and more. Because our
passion is also tied to content management systems, we decided to
eat our own dog food and build a serverless CMS using our own
framework. Webiny Serverless CMS uses Lambda functions, API
Gateway, DynamoDB, Elasticsearch (the only non-serverless component
at the moment) and S3. It scales automatically together with the
demand, requires minimal maintenance, and costs a fraction when
compared to solutions running on virtual machines or containers. It
includes a GraphQL API, asset management, and a no-code builder for
static pages and forms. It takes 2 commands to install and
configure the whole thing. Today it runs only on AWS, but we plan
to introduce the support for other clouds in the future. With our
CMS, we hope people will be more confident in the abilities
serverless brings to the market, especially when building full-
stack solutions. To put some numbers behind our product, we made a
benchmark to demonstrate the performance and cost of a Webiny full-
stack serverless application[1]. Both the framework and the CMS
are free and open-source[2] under the MIT license. We do have a
paid enterprise offering for those that require support and
additional features [3]. Give Webiny a spin:
https://www.webiny.com/. We would love to know what you think!
Resources: [1] Benchmark - https://docs.webiny.com/docs/webiny-
overview/performance-ben... [2] Github -
https://github.com/webiny/webiny-js [3] Pricing -
https://www.webiny.com/pricing
Author : SvenAl
Score : 81 points
Date : 2021-03-11 11:55 UTC (11 hours ago)
| berns wrote:
| Please, put the prices in the pricing page or change the name.
| SvenAl wrote:
| We can set a "from $50k/year" as our enterprise price is
| tailored to the client requirements. Thanks for the feedback,
| we'll include this in the next update.
| santiagobasulto wrote:
| $50k/year seems like a steep price (thinking from a
| "small/medium startup" perspective). I'm curious, what's the
| TAM for that pricing? What sort of customers could you be
| reaching? I work for a mid-size company, we do very well, but
| Idk if we'd be able to meet that price.
| SvenAl wrote:
| Thanks for sharing this feedback. We got similar feedback
| from a few smaller businesses this week. We're looking into
| introducing a package between the free open-source and the
| enterprise. Would you mind sharing what would be your price
| range where you would find Webiny affordable? I'm happy to
| jump on a call and discuss this more.
|
| With the enterprise package, we're looking at companies
| with over 250 employees as that's where the biggest
| penetration of serverless adoption is happening (source:
| https://www.datadoghq.com/state-of-serverless/). We also
| estimate that with 90% cloud penetration in this segment of
| companies, and with over 4M companies with more than 250
| employees in the world (asia mainly drives this number),
| and with 30% of them using serverless services, there are
| around 1M potential customers, bringing the total TAM to
| $50bn.
| 40four wrote:
| It's pretty common to not show 'Enterprise' level pricing to
| the public. It's all going to be different depending on the
| customer. For everyone one else, it's free, awesome! What are
| you expecting to see?
| berns wrote:
| It's totally ok not to publish the price, just don't name the
| page "pricing".
| SvenAl wrote:
| That's true, and that is the angle we took here. But I also
| understand that people like to have at least a starting price
| in mind to know if it's something within their budget or not.
| 40four wrote:
| Congratulations on the launch! This sounds awesome! Sounds like
| it could be very useful for taking some out of the complexity of
| orchestrating the various serverless components. I am very
| curious, and looking forward to trying it out!
| SvenAl wrote:
| Thank you for the support! Would love to hear what you think
| once you try it out, particularly the areas that we should
| improve.
| salimmadjd wrote:
| I've been looking for something like this for a while. It'll be
| interesting if you show some kind of a product roadmap.
|
| Maybe there is a product already out there that does that, but
| it'll be useful if google sheet can work in conjunction with your
| CMS.
| SvenAl wrote:
| We have this overview page for our roadmap:
| https://www.webiny.com/roadmap/ In case you are interested in a
| particular feature, I'm happy to help.
|
| Regarding an integration between google sheets and our CMS, we
| don't offer one out of the box, but if you create a lambda
| function on Webiny that pulls data from your google sheet, you
| can use the GraphQL API to then sync the data into the CMS.
| sekmet wrote:
| Congratulations on the launch! Amazing product!
| SvenAl wrote:
| Thank you for the support! In case of any other questions, I'm
| happy to help.
| stunt wrote:
| Congrats!
|
| It helps if we could see more details about the architecture.
| SvenAl wrote:
| You can find our architecture graphs under this link, make sure
| to checkout the subpages: https://docs.webiny.com/docs/key-
| topics/cloud-infrastructure...
| nickthemagicman wrote:
| This is cool. I've been thinking this should exist for a while.
| Glad someone is doing this.
|
| What's the cost from a cloud provider for this if a site has no
| traffic or very very small amount of traffic i.e. for a small
| personal site?
| SvenAl wrote:
| At the moment, the cost for a small site would pretty much be
| equal to the cost of the Elastisearch service, the only non-
| serverless component we have. At a minimum that would be
| ~$25/mo.
|
| We're looking to add plugins for Elasticsearch so you can
| replace it with something like Algolia making the whole thing
| 100% serverless. In that case, the cost would be zero, as it
| would be 100% under the AWS free tier. Once the free tier
| expires, the cost would probably be in cents. Have a look at
| our performance benchmark reports, we've noted down the cost of
| each test in detail for each of the AWS services:
| https://docs.webiny.com/docs/webiny-overview/performance-ben...
| rodolphoarruda wrote:
| Congratulations. This product is amazing and represents the
| future of CMS. It's all Wordpress wanted to be. IMHO.
| SvenAl wrote:
| That's kind of what lit our fire to do better :)
| martinskou wrote:
| Low target...
| SvenAl wrote:
| Agreed ... we're aiming much higher than that. I just meant
| that this is where things started.
| newintellectual wrote:
| I notice that "bugfix service" isn't checked under the open
| source column, only the enterprise one.
|
| I always find it obnoxious and baffling that any company would
| delegate _bug_ fixes to (current) paid customers. Either you 're
| proud of your work and want to fix mistakes, or not. To blow off
| bug reports and bugs from anyone is a mistake.
| vz8 wrote:
| Per the website FAQ [0]: Q: "Can I see a demo of Webiny in
| action?"
|
| A: "We don't host a public demo at this time. You're welcome to
| install it yourself, or book a call with us and we'll prepare a
| demo for you."
|
| Investing the time to install it ourselves or book a demo just to
| see the framework in action adds a lot of friction.
|
| You might want to considering moving the 7 minute Webiny overview
| to a more prominent place - I didn't see the thumbnail under your
| navigation's Product menu until after hunting through numerous
| other pages, poking through getting started tutorials, and even
| ending up on your documentation page.
|
| [0] https://www.webiny.com/pricing
| SvenAl wrote:
| Thanks for the feedback. I agree a demo would be more useful.
| We might provide a more comprehensive platform overview in a
| video format. Operating a hosted demo requires us to maintain
| it and manage it. People tend to post all sorts of things in
| those types of environments, and if it's a shared install base,
| other users might see content that is not appropriate. We need
| to find a good balance here, it just something we haven't had
| time to get around to. On the overview video - I'll see what I
| can do, it's a good suggestion, thank you!
| SkyMarshal wrote:
| For an alternate take, as a developer I really don't have a
| problem with downloading and running it myself. If I were
| seriously evaluating it, I would 1) have to do that anyway,
| and 2) a hosted demo wouldn't be sufficient.
|
| Not offering the demo may be a problem for tourists who
| aren't seriously considering this, but probably not for
| parties that are in the process of looking for something like
| this for a real use case.
| SvenAl wrote:
| That was my starting point when I was thinking about this.
| However it seems there's a lot of users who just don't want
| to do that initial investment, so having a demo would
| potentially help in converting them.
| jskrablin wrote:
| If you can't be bothered to provide a demo of your product
| why should I bother setting it up myself?
| SvenAl wrote:
| We found developers, who are our target audience, want to
| test the setup, as that's part of the product experience
| and they get to learn the stack and the requirements. We
| are an open-source product, we don't have a SaaS offering,
| so we don't have a way yet to spin up demos or trial
| accounts for every user. You can view the product in our
| overview video without installing it:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gOGJKHXntiU
| nmridul wrote:
| You could do a periodic reset / relaunch of the app so the
| demo starts from a clean slate after few hours / days.
|
| I understand you sell support / hosted package. If you say
| you can't support a demo install, that would send a wrong
| message.
| SvenAl wrote:
| It's something we'll definitely look at we just haven't
| gotten to it yet. We thought of doing periodic resets, but
| that tends not to provide the best experience. We're
| thinking of having per-user instances, forcing users to
| create an account, but then delete the accounts on a
| periodic basis. This way, rather than having a single
| shared account we believe would work better. It's just
| there's a lot of things on our roadmap and we didn't think
| this one being so important. Clearly we were wrong.
| chiefalchemist wrote:
| Congrats. Intriguing, obviously.
|
| Fwiw, in the Getting Started I noticed "Our Philosophy". I'd move
| that to the home page. It's essential context (imho). Otherwise
| the home page seems too featured focus and too lite on benefits.
| I read that bullet list in Philosophy as benefits (in a way).
| That is when I sat up.
| SvenAl wrote:
| Interesting ... when I first wrote the "Our Philosophy" section
| I was guided by showing the reader the things that are guiding
| us in how we are building Webiny. Never thought of it as being
| a benefit, but I see what you mean. Thank you for your
| feedback, I'll give it more thought and see if we can push it
| out to the homepage somehow.
| chiefalchemist wrote:
| It's more of a benefit than features. Features too often
| don't answer the question:
|
| Why should _I_ care?
|
| The philosophy at least spoke to me as opposed to features
| being about you.
| SvenAl wrote:
| I see what you are saying, looking at our homepage, it's
| true, we talk feature-talk. We'll be addressing this.
| chiefalchemist wrote:
| Not to worry, you're not alone :)
|
| You are, as you should be, in love with your product
| (read: a collection of features). You know the nooks &
| crannies.
|
| Moi? I don't care. I'm selfish. We all are. I need to
| know what you are going to do for _me_. What pains of
| mine are you going to fix? Benefits is short for: Use our
| product and we'll make these pain - X, Y, and Z -
| disappear.
|
| Make me believe in your magic :)
| SvenAl wrote:
| Amazing, thanks for this!
| wyck wrote:
| The toolset looks like you made it for your own workflow and not
| actual users, meaning it's very rigid and tied to specifics
| instead of allowing for flexibility, I have a hard time actually
| understanding what this is for. The main feature of it being
| serverless isn't a selling point for me. I don't use
| Graphql/DynamoDB or any of the tools you describe outside Lambda.
| It would be simply too much work to start with all your tooling,
| that would be considerable technical debt especially compared to
| the ocean of options available with headless CMS's.
| paveldenisjuk wrote:
| Webiny is definitely not for everyone; it does have specific
| technologies engraved in the offering, like nodejs, React and
| GraphQL. That, however, doesn't mean you can't build a REST API
| with it. Webiny is first of all a development framework, to
| help you develop apps for serverless infrastructure. It's very
| flexible, and we're already working on more things that will
| make it even more adaptable to different technologies. Then on
| top of that we built the Headless CMS, the Page Builder, etc.
| to showcase the possibilities of both the framework and
| serverless services, as many developers are still hesitating to
| use them.
|
| The features we built into our apps and framework are directly
| taken from our own experience (we used to run a digital agency
| for 10 years), user feedback and many hours of calls with other
| agencies and enterprises. We do love user feedback as we can't
| possibly foresee all the possible use-cases - and that's how we
| improve our platform.
|
| If you don't use GraphQL or DynamoDB - that's perfectly fine.
| There will always be problems that are easier to solve without
| bringing a full featured framework into the mix. We also like
| to spawn a Lambda or two with some simple code for simple
| solutions. But for larger projects, we offer project
| organization, workflows, infrastructure organization, system of
| plugins, and ready-made apps which can really save you a lot of
| development time.
|
| Regarding other CMS's - yes there are many. But not many that
| are open-source and running in a serverless environment. SaaS
| solutions are not acceptable for every type of customer,
| especially not enterprises. They want to have their data in
| their own private cloud.
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(page generated 2021-03-11 23:02 UTC)