Hacker News Reader

Comment by anurag | Hacker News Reader

Hello fellow Xtripe! This blog post wasn't meant to focus on differentiation, but you might find this useful:

https://render.com/docs/render-vs-heroku-comparison

Every announcement, _especially_ huge press events like fundraising, should be clear on value prop and differentiation. I’m a potential user. You had my eyeballs, but missed the opportunity to sell me. And if you can do it in 3–5 sentences, you can put that everywhere.

It’s so, so, so important to repeat your message at every opportunity; particularly at moments, like fundraising announcements, where you’ll have access to new potential users (vs. something like a feature release where the readers are far more likely to be existing users.)

Additionally, another group of readers here would be potential hires. They probably want to know why you’re different!

It's not helping me. All I understand is that you provide some stuff for Docker, static web sites, and databases. That's good, but it seems very specific. So specific that, as a former devops, I don't understand why you could be useful to me or why I would need your help.

We need to improve our product marketing! Render focuses exclusively on application engineers who need to run things in the cloud without worrying about devops; this also means we don't focus on the needs of devops engineers.

It also means that when an application reaches a certain maturity or complexity, they have to leave platforms like Render to clouds where they can do the things they need to operate with efficiency. There is a tradeoff point. Platforms like Render are small team efficient, clouds are organization efficient

This is the narrative we disagree with most people on and are focused on disproving: multiple unicorns have started and stayed on Render, and our platform continues to add capabilities as their needs become more complex.

Exceptions to the rule (some unicorns, a crude measure for tech needs) do not break the rule. If anything, the trend is shifting back to self-hosting instead of running on any vendor.

If you add the same capabilities you end up becoming the cloud provider concept you wish to "disprove", and I would posit that feature creep reinforces the concept

Which unicorns?

A lot of apps never grow to that size, and can run on services like render or heroku forever, saving millions of dollars in devops cost (the most expensive part of devops is the devops engineer).

A good number of companies out there move to google scale infrastructure and spin up whole devops teams when they would be fine without all that out of fear of having to move later. That later might never come.

A good devops engineer or team will pay for itself, so it becomes an asset rather than a liability. A certain amount of scale or complexity forms a baseline. I get consulting / contracting gigs for this very reason, granted what I do goes beyond just cloud infra & costs, devops/dx as a philosophy rather than a job title. It is valuable to an organization to have some(one|people) thinking about these problems from a global & holistic view

nothing that you can't do in AWS but generally Render tries to do things in less clicks and have less advanced clicks for you to accidentally press. Thats pretty much it nothing fancy.

Is Render still using Knative?

https://render.com/blog/knative ?

Not any more. We replaced it with our own code that did exactly what we needed it to do.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com