[gnarmis]

But Hyper.sh is still competitive, I think, even though it's super young. They already have a high level AWS Lambda alternative (Hyper Func) that uses containers and is fully language agnostic, and they have reasonable pricing-per-minute figured out.

They also have open sourced their tech [1], so for certain companies they probably are compelling.

Perhaps they should provide the kind of ease-of-use on top of the stuff they already provide that will cut open a steady market for them, like a Heroku but with this underlying tech and thus more dynamic on scaling and flexible on tech stack.

[1] https://github.com/hyperhq/runv is one example

[gnepzhao]

Founder kicks in.

The vision is to merge PaaS into IaaS, e.g. a microservice-native cloud. I want to ask more details of the upper-layer features you imagine. Thanks!

[gnarmis]

For small teams like the one I work in, and for solo work I have dabbled a bit in, I can imagine the following thought process if I have a git repo and sit down to think about how to best deploy it.

- I start researching how to deploy this, but I don't care about optimizing for a lot of scale. I DO care a lot about iteration speed, integration with image registry + code repository + CI/testing services (ideally out of the box), and not making it hard to maintain/deploy/expand for the rest of the team (if an associate engineer can be brought up to speed on the infra and become fairly independent, that'd be wonderful).

- I probably care about burstable, pay-for-usage infra. But it'd be great if that was somewhat abstracted away. Perhaps even based on requests-per-minute, and I set up limits about how far it should scale. (This would immediately put this far and above Heroku -- good, cost-efficient auto scaling)

- I really care about not having to maintain my own DB cluster myself. And similarly for key/value storage and block-file-storage (like s3). And I'd absolutely love to not have to myself tweak and implement something common like cron or logging.

- And I'd probably care about integration with error-detection services and performance monitoring services.

- It would be absolutely amazing if there were default stacks/recipes with load balancers, so the common cases were easy (a common case like a standard RDBMS-backed JSON REST Api using cron and background jobs, or a static website (which basically covers all SPA-like frontends, if you add in a flexible reverse-proxy URL-rewriting solution))

Then, I could pick it up and be fine depending on it, since costs would scale down to my level (plus some premium I guess, but hey I'm even okay with Heroku for some things). But I could probably continue to stick with it for a long time. Inertia in ops means that if you get green field projects early and sustain them, my guess is that they stick around longer than they really even should -- but that's just an unverified guess on my part, idk.

ps -- the thing that really strongly drew me to hyper.sh was that I could abstract away the whole cluster behind `hyper`, like `docker` on my own computer. That was an amazing selling point, coming at after the popcorn machine of container management solutions with their very own intricate towers of complexity. It's what I like about sandstorm.io in part -- abstracting away a lot of complexity about hosting apps. But there's other complexity that could perhaps be eased or simplified, since running a software project is not simply the same as running an app on a computer, networking, load balancing, data security, backups and so on add up to a lot. So it's not enough that `hyper` abstracts away the data center, because there's scope for some more simplification for a certain slice of market: smaller teams who can't afford a full ops team, or teams with a small ops team who want to tackle a monstrous tech project.

[gnepzhao]

Thanks for the detailed input. They are tremendously valuable.

Part of the reason we chose to open source is that we want the community to innovate. We are continuing to build the feature set, however I need to say that the workflow varies from app to app. Therefore, by providing the base building block and allowing others to create different solutions, we could enable more options to the market.

[gnarmis]

Yeah that makes sense. If there's enough of an enticement to adopt the infra service and you standardize the API at the bottom, any developments/contributions on top of it could co-exist and be more share-able. I'm reminded of the addon marketplace in Heroku. The underlying infra was consistent and general, which made third party plugins/addons/contributions easier (even to make money). Heroku ended up getting a lot of specialized support for platform customers that they probably couldn't have built out themselves.

I could totally see even seeding a possible 'marketplace' with your own services. Like perhaps Func as a service, powered by Hyper. And others also benefiting from the underlying infra being so simple. Why wouldn't a platform-provider use an infra service that's flexibly scalable on perf+price? They probably have the skillset on hand for that too and don't need any more finesse than already exists, beyond stability.

Anyway, that's just my own ramblings. Hope you're having fun with Hyper! It sure looks like a lot of love/tears went into it.