The ftp guy is the spark that inspire me to work on a storage independant web ui as I was trying to understand what in the actual FTP protocol was missing to make it happen. Turns out, it works and file manager are great abstraction to a lot more things than FTP alone and that oss project has been used by a couple millions people around the world (https://github.com/mickael-kerjean/filestash). If the FTP guy ever see this, I owe you a couple beers!
That's definitely not the same situation. Porter's advantage would be pricing but GCP, AWS and Azure give away thousands of USD for startups to start so it's even cheaper than Porter to start.
We also offer a feature called one-click SOC2 compliance that configures your AWS account to pass controls on platforms like Vanta/Drata in a single click, which many startups find useful.
Not everyone gets those credits. If you’re not vc-backed or ai it used to be harder to get decent credits. Also the credits expire after 1-2 years and then what?
Ouch, that's an absurd comparison. Instead of commenting nonsense, how about explaining to me how I'm missing the mark here?
Let's break it down a bit...
"Porter takes care of a lot of generic DevOps work for you (like setting up CI/CD, containerizing your applications, autoscaling, SSL certificates, setting up a reverse proxy)."
All of this is done for you on GCP with the aforementioned services.
"Porter Cloud for as long as it saves you time and development cost, but at any time you can press the “eject button” to migrate your app to your own AWS, Azure, or GCP account as you please."
Why add an additional service, and set yourself up for having to "eject", when you can just start off on the right foot to begin with?
It looks like Preview Environments could be a part of it. It seems costly though. It says they get a copy of the database. I don’t know if they pass the costs on to the customers and if the customers have to avoid pushing code too often without excluding it from the build (by adding something like “no ci” to the commit message).
I love GCP (did a migration to it at my last place), but I think like all cloud providers, it's a lot more "some assembly required" than Porter looks like, or like Heroku used to be back in the day.
To my knowledge GCP doesn't have a git-push deployment. Cloud Run might be the closest thing if you do a Docker push, but that is just one part, then you need a database, still need CI/CD, etc.
It's close. And while I like the look of Porter, I probably wouldn't bother and would jump straight to GCP, but I do think there are usability differences.
OP here. Cloud Run actually does have a git-push deployment and is pretty easy to use. This is why I preemptively added this bit in the post:
> [1] By “big three clouds” we mean the lower-level primitives of each cloud provider. We don’t mean their higher level offerings like AWS App Runner, Google Cloud Run, or Azure App Service, since those run into the same PaaS problems described above.
Porter is explicitly designed to be a competitor to these services that is 1) more flexible 2) cloud-agnostic 3) more cost-effective. Many of our users come from Cloud Run because they need to customize networking settings (timeouts, websockets, etc.) or autoscaling behavior, not to mention the rather expensive cost (taking as an example a machine with 2 vCPU and 4GB RAM, Cloud Run is around 3~4x the cost of what equivalent compute would cost as a VM).
Agree, and Cloud Run's upcoming application canvas feature appears to offer a simple way to integrate the various GCP services together seamlessly without much hassle.