M3O – An open source AWS alternative | Hacker News Reader

M3O – An open source AWS alternative

github.com

32 pointsdecrypt10 comments

While "AWS Alternative" sets the bar really high, I've always thought that it'd be cool to have a coreutils for web stuff.

Things like weather, geo-ip, geocoding, translation, currency, basic signup forms, etc could well be an all-in-one single payment type thing.

It seems like this does a lot of that and I would focus branding around that part specifically. Running an s3-like and DB is also a much harder problem that there are good solutions for!

Will be giving it a try!

This is apparently the trend right now, and these utilities are already there. What's still hard to do is the "glue" that connects the infrastructure/scaling side with the building blocks: that's "still" developers/devops work. Maybe a vertical approach will likely work in practice: like having a platform that allows idea to app in 1 week or less with minimal human intervention (authentication/signup, authorization/permissions/credentials, marketing automation and analytics, billing, email collect, static pages templates, CRM, media storage and delivery, infrastructure and scaling) in a specific domain, let's say for example in the edtech space.

Crikey, these folks have been pivoting a lot over the last few years.

Originally, this was a complex set of libraries that made up a microservice framework. Then they threw everything into micro and making it more stable and simpler. Then they launched m3o which had no free tier but it was a place to run micro apps. Now it's an AWS Alternative?

I liked them, I donated money to them for a while through Github, but it really has taken five years to figure out what they do and why, and after a while, I lost interest in following them. I'm sure it's great, though.

What makes this specifically an alternative to AWS? With name calling them I would expect some sort of compatibility with APIs etc? Else I don't see how its anything other than 'a cloud provider'.

I think they misunderstand what AWS does to be honest.

From the GitHub page:

> M3O is built on existing public cloud infrastructure using managed kubernetes along with our own infrastructure automation

So apparently you can run M3O on AWS? Except it's a bit unclear if you can actually run M3O on your own hardware at all. But part of AWS is also managed Kubernetes, so can you run Kubernetes on M3O on Kubernetes?

At interesting as this looks, it's mislabeled.

M3O seems to be more like an API aggregator with its core available as open source. Not an AWS alternative at all. Ultimately it looks like it is hosted on DigitalOcean if you let them run it for you: https://github.com/m3o/platform/blob/39b5d04a933ae3b63490081... for example. If it is meant to be an AWS alternative, then it will grow as big and complex as AWS if it gets popular and used by many.

Some of the API-wrapped services require you to get separate accounts for them like weather, sms, email, etc. Don't see a value unless they have multiple providers for each service to pick from. And then you may be in the situation of wanting a feature available for only one of the providers... in which case you'll end up having them to wait to support the feature, or support tacking on info to API calls not unlike Kubernetes metadata annotations. Or in the UI world waiting on features being added to a cross-platform API.

AWS alternative is a big statement.

OpenStack is AWS on steroids then.

duplicate https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28851167

I also made an open-source cloud, but really the whole point with AWS is the hardware!

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