[HN Gopher] Netlify raises $105M and acquires OneGraph
___________________________________________________________________
Netlify raises $105M and acquires OneGraph
Author : marc__1
Score : 265 points
Date : 2021-11-17 14:04 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.netlify.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.netlify.com)
| jokethrowaway wrote:
| Between Netlify, Vercel and bigger providers like Cloudflare and
| AWS, there are plenty of companies trying to own static websites.
|
| After R2, I have a feeling Cloudflare will come up with a
| competitor soon and swallow the entire market.
| user3113 wrote:
| there is one more similar product https://www.stormkit.io/
| .They seem to be smaller bootstrapped company
| kevinak wrote:
| Looks like they just did, some 40 minutes ago:
| https://blog.cloudflare.com/cloudflare-pages-goes-full-stack...
| kmf wrote:
| Pages has actually been GA since April of this year[1] -
| since then, we've released support for deploy hooks,
| redirect/custom header files, GitLab support, and as you
| mentioned above, a Workers function integration.
|
| We have a really excellent team building Pages, and we still
| think there's a lot of unexplored territory around
| Pages/Jamstack and how it interacts with serverless and edge
| functions. Exciting times!
|
| [1]: https://blog.cloudflare.com/cloudflare-pages-ga/
| santa_boy wrote:
| Any idea which is the cheapest place to host very light very
| low traffic static sites ('000s)?
|
| I liked Vercel but their account mgmt exec told me that it will
| cost '000s of $ p.m.
|
| I'm going for a personal VM right now. I'm assuming it can
| easily host lots of sites. Not sure but I may be in for lots of
| surprises if the scaling ever happens.
|
| Would be happy to know from more any experienced folks.
| pwdisswordfish9 wrote:
| The VPS approach is not a bad one.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21614741
| jerrygoyal wrote:
| I'm not sure why vercel mgmt told you that but I'm running
| few (low traffic) production sites on vercel and it's free of
| cost.
| listless wrote:
| I'm with you here. CloudFlare's speed and downright mastery of
| the CDN is miles ahead of everyone else (I work for one of the
| clouds), their workers are insanely good and the speed at which
| they add genuinely brilliant features is astonishing. They are
| a full cloud now.
|
| Netlify and Vercel are outstanding solutions. But they are not
| a cloud and I don't see viability beyond acquisition. Lots of
| developers using free stuff is great, but only if you can
| monetize it. Cloudflare has been around a long time, has proven
| they can monetize and seem to be the emerging "developer cloud"
| leader.
|
| https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/NET/financials/
| lvl100 wrote:
| Good for them! I am surprised Amazon hadn't purchase them by now.
|
| I really think Netlify can do something incredible if they can
| offer an e-commerce solution (Stripe/Square/EasyPost/Shippo) that
| can compete with Shopify. And probably why Vercel is moving in
| this direction.
| BartBoch wrote:
| This can go really close to antitrust laws - I am not sure if
| the risk is worth it.
| gk1 wrote:
| How? There's Vercel and Cloudflare to compete against.
| dymk wrote:
| It's not about being a monopoly, it's leveraging their
| power in other markets to have an advantage in this market.
| lvl100 wrote:
| As far as I am concerned, the US is not going to go after
| tech monopolies outside of maybe Facebook. They are quite
| literally taking over the world and that's bringing a lot of
| money and benefits to US interests. The US is a commerce
| first country. They will never stand in the way.
| handrous wrote:
| If we were doing things right and wanted to really benefit
| from having these giants around, we'd go 1950s-Japan on
| them and harness them to drive a broader prosperity-
| increasing economic engine, while still letting them thrive
| and grow huge, while guiding them to advance broader
| economic-strategic goals.
|
| Having them around and so globally dominant is a _huge_
| opportunity, and one that won 't last forever. But I doubt
| we'll use it like we could before that time's over.
| buro9 wrote:
| Or Cloudflare
| BossingAround wrote:
| Big cloud providers (and esp. Amazon) can likely build a better
| service within +-6 months if they wanted to, so I don't think
| it makes much sense for Amazon/Google/Microsoft to buy Netlify.
|
| As a side note, Github already does a more than competent
| Netlify competitor for static webpages.
| ascorbic wrote:
| Have you tried using Amplify?
| gk1 wrote:
| And how long will it take them to acquire 1M+ users?
|
| Sometimes "building" isn't the hardest part.
| cblconfederate wrote:
| Been waiting for years for startups to start paying users
| to join
| lvl100 wrote:
| To be fair, any of the big tech monopolies can replicate
| anything out in the marketplace today for less than $100M.
| neom wrote:
| How's AWS lightsail working out as a DO competitor?
| sergiotapia wrote:
| bullshit - AWS has existed for years and their UI is
| atrocious. Netlify's UI meanwhile is delightful to use and
| predictable. You can get something up and running in no time
| flat, even without Netlify experience.
| biggestlou wrote:
| Calling GitHub a competitor for static sites seems like a
| real stretch
| danielvaughn wrote:
| I use Netlify exclusively for all my personal projects. It
| literally takes like 2 minutes to stand up a site with automated
| deployments from github. For that alone it's wonderful. I think
| they're doing serverless functions now - haven't touched them but
| interested to see what they do there.
| cvhashim wrote:
| Same. Perfect tool for me.
| hasmanean wrote:
| I first thought it said "Netflix raises $105 million" and
| thought...that's funny.
| v1g1l4nt3 wrote:
| Big fan of Netlify and also their director of developer
| experience, Cassidy Williams. She's able to distill "life as a
| developer" accurately into memes. 'Tis a gift. Her twitter with
| best memes: https://twitter.com/cassidoo Recent interview:
| https://srcgr.ph/cassidy-williams
| dreyfan wrote:
| It's bewildering to me how Netlify, Vercel, Cloudflare and others
| have convinced the modern crop of developers this approach is
| fundamentally different than CDN caching and that "serverless"
| somehow doesn't qualify as backend.
| Destiner wrote:
| Personally, the CDN aspect of Netlify didn't bother me much at
| the time. The killer feature was the "git push to deploy".
| Compared to S3, that was ground breaking.
| gk1 wrote:
| Maybe there's something to this that you don't see? Have you
| spoken with Netlify/Vercel/Cloudflare users to learn why they
| love those services so much?
| mrkurt wrote:
| Netlify and Vercel are frontend developer productivity and
| workflow tools. The value is not "CDN caching".
| tbarn wrote:
| Agreed, it's a whole new git based workflow. When I was doing
| full stack applications 10 years ago, it looked similar in
| some ways, but it was a lot different to me. I also had to
| care much more about servers. CDN caching is just one
| feature.
| _fat_santa wrote:
| This. I consider Netlify and Vercel to be more focused
| versions of AWS for static site hosting. You can host a
| static site on AWS no problem, but AWS is so massive that a
| good chunk of your time is going to be spent just wrangling
| with the AWS services themselves.
|
| What Netlify (and Vercel) did is take all those disparate
| features across AWS that you use for static site hosting, and
| package them up with a nice UI and easy access.
| latortuga wrote:
| I know I'm nitpicking a bit here but it's more accurate to
| say that it's static HTML, JS, and CSS hosting. If you want
| to host images you have to solve that yourself. This part
| is pretty confusing to me given that both Vercel and
| Netlify have pretty much 1-click solved the rest of static
| site hosting.
| nsp wrote:
| For vercel you can't just throw the images in your
| `public/` folder or equivalent? I'm almost positive I've
| done that. Doesn't work for user generated images ofc,
| though cloudflare has some sort of solution there
| tbarn wrote:
| basically do this for sites that are on Netlify too.
| notsureaboutpg wrote:
| I host a static site on GCP with buckets, just have a quick
| script to build my site and use the GCP command line tool
| to push the site to the buckets, and then I proxy those
| buckets with Cloudflare and I'm good to go. No need for
| Vercel / Netlify there.
|
| I think when it comes to hosting Next.js or other frontend
| frameworks that do SSR, then it makes sense to use these.
| Am I mistaken?
| dreyfan wrote:
| Does it solve any problems which aren't self-inflicted by the
| convoluted JS ecosystem and toolchain?
| mrkurt wrote:
| Yes.
| dreyfan wrote:
| https://i.imgur.com/PF7uxDY.png
|
| What about end user experience?
| mrkurt wrote:
| Also yes. That screenshot doesn't have anything to do
| with Netlify, it's our own busted app release on our own
| servers. :D
| [deleted]
| dreyfan wrote:
| Obviously but you're in the same pool of "commit and
| magically deployed globally" service offering, except I
| think you're actually providing value (deploying backend
| services alongside static content) as opposed to a commit
| hook and a cache update.
| vagrantJin wrote:
| Yeah. I've used Netlify for a few years as a frontend guy and
| they're awesome.
| [deleted]
| pc86 wrote:
| Destliner, you are shadow banned and vouching has stopped
| working for me so I can't reply, but "git push to deploy" is
| just CI/CD. I'm not sure what's groundbreaking about that,
| other than the fact that someone else set it up?
| rglover wrote:
| Convenience blinds.
| virgil_disgr4ce wrote:
| So things shouldn't be simpler, faster and easier to use?
| rglover wrote:
| They should/can, but not at the expense of understanding
| how the underlying system works.
|
| Right now, the major players significantly abstract away
| from "how the web works" which means newer developers don't
| understand and are being led into a trap. Cute marketing
| terms like "serverless" confuse developers into thinking
| there is no server (or even worse, that there's such a
| thing as a "serverless developer").
|
| I'm working on this problem right now:
| https://github.com/cheatcode/joystick. I know I sound like
| a curmudgeon when I say this stuff but it's a serious
| problem that will have dire consequences later (see:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZSRHeXYDLko).
| tnolet wrote:
| > Right now, the major players significantly abstract
| away from "how the web works" which means newer
| developers don't understand and are being led into a trap
|
| Well, that argument always goes. Linux users don't know
| how CPU scheduling works. CPU builders don't know how
| silicon etching works. The list is endless.
|
| Web developers should build experiences with the best
| tools available. Apparently, these are the new preferred
| tools.
|
| There is no trap.
| rglover wrote:
| You just made my point. Watch the Jonathan Blow talk I
| linked, he calls out (in detail) exactly what you just
| said.
| gk1 wrote:
| Have you actually run into developers who think
| "serverless" means there is no server anywhere? Does
| anyone think "cloud" means there are no servers? I think
| -- and maybe I'm wrong -- it's obvious that of course
| there's a server, it's just not mine to care for.
| rglover wrote:
| Yes, I've worked with them 1-on-1.
| bnchrch wrote:
| I do love that this is literally old man yells at the
| cloud.
|
| Though in general our profession is built on and about
| building abstractions.
|
| I don't expect every 2010s web dev to know the
| intricacies of memory allocation, nor do I expect every
| 2020s web dev to know about nginx config or asset cache
| invalidation.
|
| It's handy sure, but required no. They're all
| abstractions that you learn if and when necessary.
| rglover wrote:
| I'm 33.
| handrous wrote:
| 37. Very glad I'll have a long career fixing broken
| "apps" when web devs no longer have a clue how TCP _or
| HTTP_ works.
|
| Hell, many don't know about tons of HTML features, many
| of which are literally decades old at this point. "Web"
| dev indeed.
| [deleted]
| dntrkv wrote:
| You can be an old man at 33, I've met plenty in this
| industry.
| rglover wrote:
| Congratulations. That doesn't disqualify my point.
| hasmanean wrote:
| Yup. Paradoxically I find it much easier to understand
| something when I know the layer inmediately below it.
|
| Middle layers of software stacks are not implemented in a
| way that makes sense in isolation. There is always a
| reason why something is done a certain way and that
| reason usually comes from a lower layer.
|
| For people who love to ask "why", being forced to
| understand a single layer of a software stack is mental
| torture. Those who proclaim something is good because
| "you don't have to think about x,y,z" are missing the
| point. Yes in the near term maybe, but long term its not
| the best solution.
| dreyfan wrote:
| Yeah I suppose? I think the "git push and it's magically
| live" aspect is great. I just wish modern devs understood how
| the web actually functions so that understanding is
| transferable instead of thinking it's all magic.
| rglover wrote:
| Unless they have a personal desire to do so, they won't.
| Most developers are driven by what others are doing and if
| everyone is building on Netlify and using Cloudflare
| Workers, they'll just do that and assume they understand.
|
| This will inevitably end with a whole lot of people not
| having a clue how to do what they think they know how to do
| when these companies go _poof_ (or are swallowed by private
| equity).
| nostrebored wrote:
| If they go poof, competitors will take their space.
| People have decided managed services are worth the cost.
| Building them is not inordinately complicated. There will
| always be contenders.
| rglover wrote:
| If there are people who understand how to build the
| replacement. This is a degenerative spiral. I'll be wrong
| for ten years and then all of a sudden? There's no one
| around to Superman in and save the day.
| handrous wrote:
| They're basically CPanel on steroids (=orchestrating a whole
| bunch of servers/services instead of a single server) with low-
| code features (workers) built in. You can go from nothing to
| having a demo for some small application in a day or two, while
| hardly leaving their site. For cloudflare, for example:
| register domain, set up DNS, deploy "web app" UI as a site,
| write a quick & dirty API in workers (you can even write it all
| in-browser!), letting CF handle all the routing and such.
|
| They're similarly pointy-clicky one-stop-shop for fairly
| complex external _and internal_ networking, on high-tier plans,
| at least for Cloudflare.
|
| I am very aware of the risks with things like this, but the
| appeal is clear.
| TheCoelacanth wrote:
| It's not fundamentally different.
|
| It is a nice, managed solution for it where someone else takes
| care of it for you.
|
| It doesn't need to be revolutionary to be worth paying for.
| WORMS_EAT_WORMS wrote:
| Weird comment. You kind of miss the point entirely. Serverless
| is about scale -- not about not having a backend.
|
| It's a CDN with a backend which is attractive. Effortless,
| infinitely scalable, dynamic web apps.
| dreyfan wrote:
| > Effortless, infinitely scalable, dynamic web apps.
|
| That's awfully reminiscent of the MongoDB meme.
| SnowingXIV wrote:
| Years ago I applied to Netlify and went through a pretty lengthy
| interview process and at the very end it was between me and one
| other guy.
|
| He got it. Now I'm really bummed I missed out. Hats off to him
| though. Really happy for Netlify's success, still use them for
| many projects/clients.
| wdb wrote:
| I applied for a job, got the job offer in April last year, but
| the week before I started they retracted my job offer due to
| covid-19. And then they mailed in February this year
| swyx wrote:
| yikes. really sorry to hear that. i remember advocating for a
| hiring freeze in march due to expectation of prolonged
| recession. we didnt really expect (but maybe should have)
| that the big offline-to-online shift would result in MORE
| business, not less.
| latchkey wrote:
| Why not try again?
| semitones wrote:
| The equity one would receive now pales in comparison to the
| equity you'd receive as an early engineer.
| latchkey wrote:
| > Years ago
|
| You missed the subtle comment. I was replying to the fact
| that the OP had years to try to find a job at that company.
|
| If they really wanted to work there and they had been that
| close in the interview process, another round would have
| likely gotten them in.
|
| This is a common issue that I've seen in the tech world
| over the years. People fail one time and never try again.
| SnowingXIV wrote:
| Honestly, I still did want to work there and they said
| they would reach out next time a position opened up but
| this never happened or got lost in the shuffle. I
| probably should have taken it upon myself to reach out to
| them and that's a failure on my part for sure.
| nathanaldensr wrote:
| The "we'll reach out to you" is almost never true in
| practice. It's just a nice way of saying "goodbye."
| MrDunham wrote:
| Agreed that this is usually true.
|
| Oddly, my wife interviewed with Facebook (~7 years ago),
| got the "no, but we'll reach out to you if something
| comes up", and 2-3 months later they did. She's been
| working there ever since.
|
| So well 99% of the time I would say don't expect to hear
| back... my n=1 experience says it's not impossible.
| jacobr1 wrote:
| Big companies could handle this so much better. They are
| going to hire thousands of $role in any given year. Once
| an applicant gets routed to a particular team, they might
| not get picked in favor of another candidate, but that
| doesn't mean they would be a fit for any of the other
| hundreds or thousands of open positions.
|
| It seems like something an ATS startup could fix, though
| it also seems hard to address, since your customer would
| need to be an enterprise which is a hard first-niche for
| a product.
| latchkey wrote:
| Super true!
| vagrantJin wrote:
| It is disheartening, especially if you get to the latter
| stages. Many moons ago, it always felt weird when I met
| someone from HR or Engineering at a company I interviewed
| at in a conference or a talk and they wave like -
|
| _hey Vagrant! How are you doing? How 's life? You got
| around to launching that project? We were so intrigued by
| it...blah blah blah_
|
| It just felt...patronizing. Maybe it's made worse by the
| fact that the city is tight knit and you're bound to bump
| into people from the industry. But I can't stand it.
| latchkey wrote:
| I hear you, it certainly is. Similar is asking a someone
| out. The people who realize it is just a numbers game,
| usually end up getting more dates. =)
|
| Some people take this as an opportunity to grow a thicker
| skin and change their game so they have more chances for
| success.
| vagrantJin wrote:
| Is it a thick skin thing? Maybe. Rejection still hurts
| even though my reaction now is little more than a shrug.
| latchkey wrote:
| What was your reaction before?
|
| Of course rejection hurts. Some people shrug and let it
| roll off never to think about it again. Some people get
| mad. Some people use it as motivation to do bigger
| things.
| pm90 wrote:
| Circumstances change. Switching jobs isn't easy. If you
| find another gig that seems to work, it seems alright.
|
| I also want to argue with the framing of pursuing a job
| at a company just to work at a company. When I
| interviewed with startups and I wanted to join, it was
| not just the company but also where they were at. The
| same company will change drastically when it goes from
| 10->100->500->1000 employees etc. The problems they need
| to solve are different, and so on.
|
| Basically it may not be the same company that originally
| excited you.
| latchkey wrote:
| That's why I asked the question, "Why not try again?"
|
| I didn't just assume it was because the OP just gave up,
| even though they admitted so above.
| latchkey wrote:
| Additionally, if the only reason you are applying to a job
| is the potential for equity, you're going to be
| disappointed more often than not.
|
| Life is too short to only work for equity.
| ascorbic wrote:
| (I work at Netlify)
|
| The most exciting thing in this announcement for me is the $1
| million committed to open source project sponsorship. More
| companies that rely on OSS should use some of their funding like
| this.
| ghuntley wrote:
| Geoff here from Gitpod. I agree.
|
| > Gitpod has created an open-source sustainability fund and
| allocated an initial amount of USD 30,000 towards securing our
| open-source supply chain by paying open-source maintainers. I
| often wonder what the future would look like if these high
| achievers that our digital society is built upon were empowered
| to become independent artists. If just one of those people can
| help more people better understand a technology or improve the
| developer experience for an entire ecosystem what is the
| worth/value of that and why isn't our industry doing that yet?
|
| https://www.gitpod.io/blog/gitpod-open-source-sustainability...
| pistoriusp wrote:
| Totally agree! I think open-source will be a viable career path
| in the next few years. One where you don't have to join a
| company to get paid, but can rather pave your own way.
|
| Of course, you now have investors and you have to keep them
| happy, but you don't have to give up your autonomy entirely.
| iamgopal wrote:
| How about co-operative like structure for open source ?
| ascorbic wrote:
| How would you see that working?
| kdomanski wrote:
| Isn't the Apache Foundation exactly that?
| SNosTrAnDbLe wrote:
| Shout out to Netlify. I use it to power my personal webpage
| using Jekyll and its a delight to work with and the
| documentation is spot on. The deployment is very
| straightforward and gives me a good amount of control.
| swyx wrote:
| Related news and media
|
| - techcrunch https://techcrunch.com/2021/11/17/netlify-
| snags-105m-series-...
|
| - BVP https://www.bvp.com/news/why-netlify-is-the-architecture-
| for...
|
| - Onegraph https://www.onegraph.com/blog/post/9/onegraph-is-
| joining-net...
|
| - the new API Auth demo
| https://www.netlify.com/blog/2021/11/17/first-look-announcin...
| robbiemitchell wrote:
| Love Netlify. Have to migrate soon because we need a visual CMS
| for marketing to edit the site more visually and "Netlify CMS" is
| not nearly as mature as Netlify itself, or competitors like
| CloudCannon.
|
| Netlify: please make the CMS a first-class citizen so we can keep
| projects on you!
| _fool wrote:
| (I work for netlify).
|
| You are aware that any headless CMS works well with netlify,
| right? (even some less headless ones, but these are easy):
| Contentful, Sanity, Ghost, Forestry? Our CMS is an open source
| project that is community maintained these days, not managed by
| us :)
| deltron3030 wrote:
| You can use WordPress with a full site editing enabled theme
| providing the visual builder, and host a static version on
| Netlify.
|
| Check this out: https://lokl.dev/
| pwdisswordfish9 wrote:
| I tried to publish a very simple static site with Netlify not
| that long ago (post COVID lockdowns). Just several (~4) plain
| text (unminified) JS, CSS, and HTML files. There was also a
| .git directory pointing to a non-GitHub remote, not that it
| should matter, since I wasn't trying to use Netlify for builds.
| I just wanted it to do a straightforward deployment on par with
| FTPing your work to a dumb host. Turns out, this did matter.
| The Netlify CLI was so thoroughly confused by the presence of
| this .git subdirectory that it failed hard. Not even a cryptic
| error or stack trace, the process just up and terminated. It
| took some poking around before I realized that what the trigger
| was.
|
| The utter failure to handle what seemed to me to be a
| straightforward, "hello world" sort of use case did not inspire
| confidence.
| sgallant wrote:
| I love NetlifyCMS but it sounds like you may be interested in
| what we're doing at tina.io. Contact me if you'd like a quick
| demo scott[at]tina.io
| djbusby wrote:
| Wow! Very nice, real-time preview is rad.
|
| Link to save you a click https://tina.io/
| harrisreynolds wrote:
| Strongly agree. I created an awesome integration between
| Netlify and our no-code platform WeBase [1] to solve this exact
| problem.
|
| I believe Netlify could grow even more if they embraced some
| form of "no-code" website editing in their offering or directly
| partnered with us.
|
| But what do I know? I am just sitting here watching Webflow
| gobble up this market! :-)
|
| Congrats to the Netlify guys on this raise! Maybe we should
| apply for their new investment program.
|
| [1] https://www.webase.com
| roofwellhams wrote:
| We used it for 50 websites with pages from 10 to 50k pages per
| website and for bigger websites this Netlify cms + Gatsby was
| pretty bad in terms of build performance and editing. Ended up
| building something custom.
| marban wrote:
| Back in the days it was a tie between Netlify and surge.sh but
| it's safe to say that we have a winner.
| mxstbr wrote:
| The OneGraph acquisition is huge news for the GraphQL community!
| Netlify betting on GraphQL being a core piece of the JAMStack
| ecosystem for the foreseeable future is incredible.
|
| Can't wait to see how this evolves Netlify's product direction --
| just imagine what they could do with OneGraph's tech ...
| nathias wrote:
| nice, just don't turn into baddies now please
| amelius wrote:
| Often, the whole idea of investors is to make a pile of money
| that is big enough to corner a market.
|
| It has little to do with fair competition.
| ramanujank wrote:
| Congratulations to the Netlify team! They have a wonderful
| product and have managed to capture the imagination of the
| JavaScript universe!
| dang wrote:
| Related ongoing thread:
|
| _Netlify Drop_ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29254405 -
| Nov 2021 (86 comments)
| kaishiro wrote:
| One marked downside of all of this growth is that Netlify's paid
| support products have really deteriorated. If you need a support
| response in less than 48 hours, your only recourse is to saddle
| up for their full $2000/mth enterprise support plan. Otherwise, a
| regular paid account has access to email support which generally
| has ~48 hour turnaround.
|
| This has bit us several times in the past year - generally only
| when we've hit a wall that we can't reconcile ourselves
| (redirects failing to properly shadow, custom domains that need
| to be manually verified/released, SSL certs that fail to auto
| provision) and require manual intervention from Netlify. Since
| each support response requires another 48 hour wait we've had
| tickets take well over a week to reach full resolution.
|
| Don't get me wrong, we're big fans of Netlify, and we're excited
| to see them succeed in this space - they would also still be my
| first recommendation for any hobbyist looking to host a static
| site. But I no longer believe they're a tenable solution for
| hosting anything client related or critical unless you can afford
| the 24k/year for an SLA.
|
| I sure do miss the days when we could hop on livechat with
| Mathias and Chris and have them kick the servers to fix the
| certbot!
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