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Comment by daliwali | Hacker News Reader

Nobody has brought this up: why should we trust proprietary software running on the vendor's server? And more practically, how can we expect this service to be reliable in the future (related: Parse shutdown). I think this is a disturbing trend that more and more things that used to be open and on premises, are moving to the cloud/serverless/microservices hype.

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When I saw mention of AWS Lambda in their docs, I thought this was going to be something I ran myself on my own AWS account. But that's not the case. I'd really like to see more BaaS run with that model. My understanding is that the AWS Marketplace API would let them charge an upsell cost, even if I'm running all the infrastructure myself; is that not the case?

That seems like the best scenario: I have access to the infrastructure if necessary, and am paying for the value add of the service over-and-above AWS (or Google/Azure). If they stop supporting it, all my instances/lambda functions/etc are still my own.

edit: typo

Hi ryanschneider

This is a very interesting model we are actively exploring. The primary issue is that the cost of the minimum infrastructure required to run Graphcool in the scalable and fault-tolerant way we have designed our architecture is too high to make it feasible for most projects. We are offering this option on the enterprise plan, but that's a very different price point than our publicly listed plans.

Maybe it's a hybrid approach where most of the load is handled by the SaaS "mothership" but users could opt-in to running additional AWS Marketplace nodes in their own infrastructure to have more direct access to their data? This could also answer hobofan's request for a solution to BI integration.

I think that is a very valid approach. We use https://buildkite.com/ for ci and they have exactly that model, where they manage the admin panel and meta data db, but worker nodes can be deployed elsewhere

For something like this I'd have thought you'd be better off ignoring services like this and getting a Terraform setup going. Lambda functions are pretty simple to push out and it wouldn't require you to have some additional third party cruft in the middle:

https://www.terraform.io/docs/providers/aws/r/lambda_functio...

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