Porter's company blog covers its platform that runs a Heroku-like experience on a customer's own cloud, with migration guides and pricing.
HN commenters call Porter a great product, mention using it, and compare it with Heroku alternatives like Render and Dokku. Porter's founder also posted a hiring message.
Co-founder here. Thanks for asking this - we get this question a lot and have tried our best to address it in the FAQ section of our pricing page (https://porter.run/pricing). Infrastructure provisioned by Porter is constantly managed by Porter so that the end user does not have to worry about the details of maintaining a Kubernetes cluster. In this regard, our pricing structure is identical to traditional platform as a services like Heroku, Render, Fly.io, or Vercel, where the respective PaaS provider is effectively charging a margin on top of their own cloud resources on AWS/GCP. This form of leasing out the PaaS provider's AWS/GCP infrastructure to end users also often results in rapidly increasing costs especially as you start hitting scale on hosted platforms like Heroku.
The value you get from Porter is the same as these platforms: with the clusters plugged into our internal system, our team monitors your infrastructure and owns its reliability so the end user can just focus on the application. Other platforms that also run in the customer's own cloud, such as Red Hat OpenShift, has similar resource based pricing models.
On this note, we offer an option to bring your own Kubernetes cluster and connect Porter to it. In this case, the end user manages their own infrastructure and Porter purely acts as a UI on top of your own Kubernetes cluster. Accordingly, for this use case, pricing is based on the number of user seats instead of resource usage. Many of our customers…
Porter (YC S20) | Full Time | Full-Stack Engineer | NYC | https://porter.run
Hey HN, I'm Alexander, co-founder of Porter. We're building Heroku in your own cloud. We let users link up their own AWS/GCP, point to the code they want to run, and then put the rest of the hosting process on autopilot (CI/CD, SSL, autoscaling, zero downtime deploys, infra monitoring, etc).
We're hiring NYC-based engineers that are passionate about building tools for developers. If you have some experience with either Typescript or Go, or you're very interested in this space, we'd love to talk with you. As we're a fast-growing seed-stage startup, you should be comfortable with regularly shifting priorities and iterating at a very high (daily) velocity.
Some of the technical challenges we face:
* Abstracting Kubernetes - any PaaS spans a variety of use cases, so building a consistent and useful layer of abstraction requires constant awareness of the needs of many user profiles.
* Cloud Agnosticism - one of Porter's main benefits is that you get the same interface for managing services regardless of where you host. Our job is to reduce multi-cloud infrastructure complexity to a unified interface.
* Auto-Generated Frontend - each of our app/add-on templates uses a form.yaml file that programmatically generates a settings UI on the dashboard using a library of our own input primitives. Designing, expanding, and testing the functionality of these templates is non-trivial.
If this interests you,…
Porter (YC S20) | Full Time | NYC - Onsite | https://porter.run
We're building a PaaS that runs in a user's own cloud (basically Heroku on k8s). We've converted some of Heroku's largest enterprise users as well as a large base of high-growth startups despite starting just a little over a year and a half ago.
We're still a team of six but we believe in 10x engineers and are looking to grow our in-person team in NYC.
Tech stack: Go, Typescript/React, Kubernetes, AWS
Open positions:
- Product Engineer: https://www.workatastartup.com/jobs/46166
- Backend Engineer (Go): https://www.workatastartup.com/jobs/44501
- Kubernetes Engineer: https://www.workatastartup.com/jobs/45970
Please apply through https://www.workatastartup.com/companies/porter
Aptible hosts (and pays for) AWS resources on your behalf, similar to Heroku/Render/Railway. Last year, we built support for integrating Aptible into your own AWS account, but only a handful of existing customers are currently using that, and it's not available in the product by default. I'd be interested to learn why you prefer this model. If you're willing to chat about it, my email is in my profile.
Alternatively, have you checked out other PaaS-in-your-own-IaaS solutions like:
- https://porter.run/
- https://www.flightcontrol.dev/
- https://coolify.io/ (OSS, not managed)
These might not meet all your needs, and I think they're all relatively new.
Dokku maintainer here.
You can use Dokku if you just need a CLI experience (it also has a paid web ui at https://pro.dokku.com). Works well enough for single servers, and you can use plugins to make it multi-server with Kubernetes or Nomad.
If you want to abstract all the multi-server setup and/or need something a bit more professional, I also work at a company called Porter (https://www.porter.run/), which handles the lifecycle of your app on top of the three major cloud providers. It provides a really nice experience on top of your own cloud, and abstracts the complexities of provisioning VPCs, networking, security, etc.
Co-founder of Porter (https://porter.run) here - Porter brings that easy PaaS experience to a k8s cluster that's running in your own cloud account (and manages it for you so you don't have to). We specialize in serving the segment of users who don't want to manage devops fully in-house but are outgrowing their existing PaaS providers.
We are offering a credit program for early stage startups that you can apply for here. Happy to fast track your application! https://porter.run/for-seed-stage-startups