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Comment by williamstein | Hacker News Reader

What is Backplane? Why is it shutting down?

> Backplane is a service that unifies discovery, routing, and load balancing for web servers written in any language, running in any cloud or datacenter. Traffic shaping, request enrichment, blue/green deploys, and other difficult to implement networking operations become trivial when using Backplane's combination of hosted and on-premise software.

From their docs page here: https://www.backplane.io/docs

In the last ten years I have also seen 'backplane' be:

* A protocol for helping web widgets on a page communicate and share data https://openid.net/wg/bp/ . We used to support it at Livefyre to interop with certain Janrain products, but the ecosystem wasn't so big at the time. It wasn't under OpenID at the time.

* This roller coaster of a social network startup https://techcrunch.com/2015/03/06/the-backplane-black-box/

Backplane the social roller coaster was a different company.

Backplane was also an internet services company founded by FreeBSD and DragonFly BSD developer Matt Dillon:

http://backplane.com/

I remember being at a hackathon of theirs (the Lady Gaga backplane) years back and seeing dozens of what looked like Herman-Miller Aeron chairs all over the office. Maybe they got them for cheap, maybe they weren't actually Aerons, but also maybe this pretty small (I don't actually know how many employees they had..) startup had a couple tens of thousands of dollars worth of office chairs

The cost of a good chair is nothing compared to other expenses like salaries. Aerons aren't my favorite chair but I sure as hell don't want to work for a company that makes me sit in a terrible $50 Office Depot chair.

Besides, you can get Aerons for much cheaper than retail if you look.

Even if you give zero shits about your employees, the $50 office max is going to fall apart fast with daily use. HM sells somewhat stripped-down cheaper versions of certain models specifically for the bulk office drone employee market and in bulk the pricing is competitive with other makers.

I don't disagree, I just somehow got the impression they had way more chairs than employees

So cause of death is "Eaten by Amzn"?

Wow. What a nightmare to shut down just before Christmas.

So basically what ZeroMQ does at far better speeds with better latencies and reliability with a fraction of cost and it doesn't crash or stops operation out of nowhere.

Why is everything SaaS, when it is fairly easy to use existing proven solutions?

Is it just money?

I tried looking for their landing page on the wayback machine, but every snapshot I tried just shows a 404 page for some reason.

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