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Comment by ecthiender | Hacker News Reader

We built Hasura over the last few years to help us build products fast. We didn't know what it would look like when we started, but we've ended up with something like a Parse + Heroku but on your own infra so that you can mess around with the internals when required.

Key features:

1. Data APIs on a Postgres database

2. Deploy with git-push, or any docker image

3. Expose HTTP services on the API gateway over subdomains/paths

4. Automatic LetsEncrypt SSL cert generation for exposed http services

5. SSH service to get tunnelled access to TCP services on your cluster

6. Auth middleware built into the API gateway, so that upstream services don't have to resolve sessions

7. Out of the box auth APIs for password, email, recaptcha, social login. mobile-OTP stuff

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If you can launch this with a tutorial on using it with Digital Ocean and build in VPC/VPN around your VM orchestration I imagine you'll see a pretty significant response.

Aside: ran through the demo and got a "bad gateway" at the very end trying to access the todomvc-jquery app. Guessing HNs'd.

First impressions: very little magics/transparent, reasonable pieces, reasonable architecture, well packaged, nicely automated, descriptive UI, no glaring wtfs, all the bases are covered, looks easy enough to customize at any layer with skills I already have — all very sensible.

Damn.

Thanks for the feedback! Can you elaborate what you mean by little magics/transparent?

Magics: no new DSLs. The JSON to SQL thing seems more on the level of a convenience mapping than a DSL. And it can be skipped.

Transparency: I felt like it wouldn't be hard to figure out what was going on behind each step. First guess easy vs black box not-so-fun.

Overall easy to grok created app plus Hasura meta data associations and transformation points.

I like that you took time to consider ACLs out of the box, that's something that most general-purpose tools leave too much to the developer, despite them being crucial for every app

In the comparison page, it would be great to see how Hasura compares to other PAAS offerings, such as Deis, Flynn, Tsuru, etc.

Agreed that built in ACLs and Baas is really fantastic.

Thanks! The BaaS components and the session middleware are precisely what differentiates Hasura from the above platforms.

You should compare with Parse. And with Google App Engine / AppScale as well.

Fun fact: hasura in Greek stands for "loss/ lost".

Hahaha! The H in Hasura comes from Haskell, while Asura is the Sanskrit word for demon ('daemon').

It also rhymes with "Basura" which means "Trash" in Spanish. ;-)

Then I guess it was fortunate that it it was written in Haskell and not in Basic

Interesting, a couple quick questions:

* for the host-your-own version are there any HA features for Postgres?

* what language is it written in? GitHub link?

> for the host-your-own version are there any HA features for Postgres?

Not right now. This is definitely on our roadmap though.

> what language is it written in? GitHub link?

It's mostly in Haskell, with smatterings of Python. Planning to open source it soon!

What is your monetisation strategy?

We do a lot of work with large enterprises.

Haskell -- cool!

This seems like working on a similar space as loopback.io, is this correct? if not, how would you compare the two?

I ask because I'm currently using LB for a project and while I actually like it a lot I always like to be aware of alternatives and similar tools that I might need in the future.

The motivation is quite similar, especially with the out of the box APIs. The architecture/implementation is significantly different.

Key value-prop differences are that out-of-box APIs are just one part of Hasura. The idea is to make it easy to integrate with community services (containerised) or deploy your own services in whatever language/stack.

Some other specific differences:

1. Hasura Data API is a graphql like query language to Postgres.

2. Deployment is similar to Heroku. So you deploy code in any language/framework

3. Nginx based API gateway behaves like a session middleware, so that any upstrea service can re-use auth

great! seems like a nice tool to have in the toolbox :)

Nice, and you've really polished that onboarding experience. Smooth and no head-scratching moments.

One minor nit: It is quite nice that you provide links to jump to the right place for each step, but I would suggest adding images of the equivalent spot to click in the UI.

So, what's the registration code?

> Nice, and you've really polished that onboarding experience.

Thanks ! Alas, Tanmai (our CTO) will quote this at us for the foreseeable future, this being his idea.

> So, what's the registration code?

This is just something that is used with the startups and incubators we partner with. You can ignore this.

Off the cuff it looks great. Going to have to set aside some time to try it out.

This looks really cool, going to check it out this weekend. Thanks!

I like the cartoons too! Who drew them?

We have an in-house illustrator. This comment will make her very happy!

Well, you can tell her the illustrations alone would've made the visit to the site a great experience. I particularly love the ringmaster.

Thanks! We've been lucky enough to have a couple of kickass graphic designers help us with our wackiest ideas!

The logo is by https://twitter.com/shmunday Cartoons by http://www.sandhyaprabhat.com/

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