(I'm Render's founder) What should we build next, HN?
* Poor visibility into detailed metrics, especially when problems happened in the render load balancer / routing mesh. We had a specific issue where a small number of requests were failing somewhere in render's infrastructure before reaching our application, and at the time there was no visibility to allow customers to know about requests that timed out or failed within render's infrastructure rather than our application. We collaborated with your team to surface and replicate the issue, but it was frustrating. I had a very good set of conversations with a product manager on your team about what we needed and why it was important in early 2024.
* At the time, the hosted postgres implementation was immature. I think this is an area you've already improved dramatically.
* Maybe you could add support for something like AWS PrivateLink so customers can run parts of their workloads on AWS securely over a private network. This would be a neat way to allow customers to stay on Render longer as their needs grow.
Deep observability is critical for more complex environments, and things are improving dramatically on this front just as they have on Postgres.
We already support AWS PrivateLink! Reach out to support@render.com.
- Teams are still the only proper way to segment environments and access control. Yet you charge team member, I am still mad about that because even after 1+ year we need to use multiple teams.
- Metrics are still locked to your platform, I want to use my telemetry provider because you guys dont have alerts, dashboard creation, etc.
- Control over the subnets, we use tailscale to give access to private services right now its all 10.205.X.X and we dont control it
- Allow us to turn off cloudflare. You said during last outage that being reliant on cloudflare was an issue and we are yet 1+ later without progress.
I could go on. I do like the product and simplicity but it is lacking control when you actually outgrow the "get it out the door fast" phase. I am not even sure one could pass an ISO27001 by being on Render.
* Otel exports are in development and should be live in early access in a few weeks!
* Heard on subnet IPs
* There's ongoing work to remove a major Cloudflare dependency; it should also go live in a few weeks.
We'll keep polishing and pushing the envelope on control and flexibility. Thanks for being a vocal customer.
Couple of other things while I do have you:
- More control on the instance sizing similar to how you have us control of the postgres instances
- A proper write-only secrets system ala AWS Secret Manager. The current environment variables isn't passing an audit for sure if anybody on the team can log in and see them plaintext
Your support team is really good I do want to say, it is probably the one thing that kept me a customer.
- More granular secret access (and, in general, more granular RBAC) are on the list for 2025
- Render is now ISO 27001 certified [1], and we help you pass SOC 2/ISO 27001 audits.
Thanks for the support team shoutout!
[1] https://render.com/blog/render-iso-27001-and-document-center
Partnership with Neon would be great too, I run 6 dbs there for $69 with auto scaling (and scales to 0 too if needed for non-prod envs). Render would be 3-4x that price for those many dbs.
If I could make a suggestion - make it clear you are the founder of Render instead of using these parentheses “(Render founder)”!
I also have my object storage with Digital Ocean at the moment. Would love to have that all under one roof.
- Object storage
- Metrics (managed prometheus + grafana? or preferrably your own lightweight version, like your log system, which mostly gets the job done)
S3 backed object storage (too risky to use anything else or even learn anything else for it).
Congrats on the round!