[HN Gopher] Show HN: Alicorn Cloud - Easily move between AWS, GC...
___________________________________________________________________
Show HN: Alicorn Cloud - Easily move between AWS, GCP and Azure
Author : igorzij
Score : 26 points
Date : 2021-08-13 10:28 UTC (12 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (alicorncloud.io)
(TXT) w3m dump (alicorncloud.io)
| Major_Grooves wrote:
| Sounds interesting. Currently, we provide TiloDB on AWS
| serverless, and could also port it to GCP fairly easily. We
| cannot yet go to Azure, as they lack some equivalent
| technologies.
|
| What are your thoughts on serverless?
| igorzij wrote:
| We support Serverless too - Alicorn has a concept of Targets
| which are essentially different ways to run your backend code.
| You can mix & match Serverless, standalone containers and K8S.
|
| Under the hood Alicorn generates Terraform, which you can also
| customise. So you get a proper DevOps setup out of the box with
| the convenienc of Serverless but way more power if you need it
| debarshri wrote:
| Is it a PaaS on top of kubernetes? I mean if you want to be cloud
| agnostic, you can use kubernetes.
|
| Having tried to build a PaaS like experience, the value
| proposition that you are proposing is actually a self fulfilling
| prophecy. Just moving containers and apps is not enough. Large
| scale data migration from buckets to databases is super expensive
| and non trivial. One of situations that is quite commons is
| canary migration, where they would like to run both cloud
| providers and slowly phase one out. That is non-trivial too.
| Certificates starts become invalid, the migration is also
| dictated by how the apps are written too.
|
| Also, startup are fairly easy to acquire but very hard to
| monetize for the amount of effort that would go into building
| everything resilient. I think biggest problem is the sheer amount
| of permutation and combination of things.
| igorzij wrote:
| A bit more complex than that :) PaaS on top of K8S have a
| problem of serving no one - because for small cases they're too
| heavy and for large teams too inflexible, they could just as
| well use K8S directly.
|
| Alicorn actually generates infra-as-code (Terraform) using
| modular "targets". By default for container it uses managed
| engine provided by the cloud provider which costs way less than
| a dedicated K8S cluster (on AWS that'd be Fargate)
|
| But K8S is fully supported too - when you create an environment
| you can pick a Kubernetes target and get a cluster
| igorzij wrote:
| re data migration: yes, that's hard. we are leaving that to the
| user for now - but with infra out of the way this still makes
| it radically easier to move. more importantly, approaches to
| data migration are few and established, whereas infra is
| bespoke effort
|
| re monetization / permutation: we think we've solved this by
| having PaaS as the first step. that means we can provide
| defaults that we know how to handle end-to-end. the differences
| in modern SaaS stacks aren't that dramatic, and by making a few
| established patterns super easy to follow we can achieve high
| degree of uniformity
| debarshri wrote:
| Look, I am not sure if you are trying to be VC backed or not.
| But I think you can have a decent sized business with 10
| people or so. But the market is really really small and it is
| red ocean. There is lot of people doing the same thing, like
| porter.dev, quovery, etc.
|
| When we were doing this, what we saw was the moment a company
| becomes serious they will decide to do all of this
| themselves. Companies want to own the IaC which you are
| taking away. Cool aspect of the platform is actually the
| negative thing from an enterprise point of view. I think it
| will impact LTV.
|
| They want to own their own terraform script. Scripts you are
| generating can be written in matter of minutes by seasoned
| devops engineer. There is not really a moat.
| skafoi wrote:
| Do you also offer some kind of abstraction libraries when e.g.
| working with DynamoDB on AWS and then switching to GCP? Or would
| I still have to prepare my code for that?
| igorzij wrote:
| Things like Dynamo are AWS-specific, it is their way of locking
| you in. You could use MongoDB or Cassandra (which is right
| depends on what you use it for) that would work in any cloud
| provider. Moreover, for 90% of use cases the capabilities of
| good old PostgreSQL are more than sufficient, even if you store
| JSON in it and use it like a document DB.
| wanghq wrote:
| My thought when I saw the name: alicorncloud - alicloud - alibaba
| cloud
| Layvier wrote:
| Really cool, that's exactly what I would except the next
| generation after Heroku to look like. It's weird that Heroku is
| still so popular while being so expensive and with a product that
| hasn't improved in years..
| igorzij wrote:
| Yeah PaaS like Vercel and Heroku have an inherent limitation -
| at some point you need to move off them because the industry
| has moved on and you can only do so much without things like
| infra-as-code and kubernetes that became industry standard.
|
| At the same time, simplicity is needed more then ever - k8s is
| cool but now people are spending crazy amounts of time and
| money to set up the devops goodness to run simple apps
|
| So we thought, why not have both simplicity and power? We're
| just making the deeper layers of configuration optional, but
| still accessible.
| igorzij wrote:
| Hi HN! We've built Alicorn to allow startups escape vendor lock-
| in with their cloud providers.
|
| AWS, GCP or Azure - with Alicorn your stack runs anywhere. Switch
| cloud providers in one click and never run out of free credits!
|
| For a while it's been possible to build "portable" stacks that
| are easy to move across cloud providers. AWS, GCP and Azure
| nowadays are almost identical; they just don't want you to think
| this way. Docker, Kubernetes, functions, Redis, Postgres, Kafka,
| ElasticSearch - the building blocks are exactly the same. The
| problem is, it takes more work.
|
| Alicorn does the plumbing on AWS, GCP or Azure for you - so that
| your stack runs anywhere. This means you are no longer tied to
| your cloud provider!
|
| - Escape vendor lock-in - switch cloud providers in one click -
| Use free credits from all 3 major providers. This means 3 years
| free - Deploy containers, webapps, functions, databases, storage,
| etc - Get DevOps best practices out of the box, like Terraform
| and CI / CD - Best in class hosted free tier with 8gb RAM - you
| can actually run production on it
|
| Our ProductHunt launch:
| https://www.producthunt.com/posts/alicorn-cloud
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2021-08-13 23:01 UTC)