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Netlify raises $30M to replace webservers with Application Delivery Network

netlify.com

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Re: Netlify raises $30M to replace webservers with Application Delivery Network

#32

Post by mbesto »

jypepin wrote: post #3

Ok, I'm a web dev and I hate having to deal with web servers, configs, CI, etc. The idea sounds great, but I can't understand how this works from this post. Can someone explain how this works exactly? Are they basically offering a way to prebuild apps to static assets and host them on CDNs? How do server-side only things will happen then?

I love this service because it takes away the local toolchain required to do static sites and does that build process online.

If you're a ruby guy, you can do Jekyll and Middleman for example.

So my toolchain (using middleman) for my company website is:

1. Make change locally

2. Push to Bitbucket

3. Netlify notices the change to the master branch

4. Netlify pulls it to it's container, builds it

5. Newly built files are put in a CDN and HTTPS...all for free

One of my favorite services right now.

EDIT: To give more context this is what I did before:

1. Did the build using middleman to create static assets

2. Uploaded those static assets via FTP to AWS S3

Re: Netlify raises $30M to replace webservers with Application Delivery Network

#34

Post by StavrosK »

tyingq wrote: post #26

I wonder if Cloudflare has plans to compete in this space. If they added it to the $20/month plan, it might push more conversion from the free plan.

I asked them once, and they seemed pretty adamant about not hosting content. Then again, with the IPFS gateway they just added, you can pretty easily do that.

Re: Netlify raises $30M to replace webservers with Application Delivery Network

#35

Post by pixelrevision »

tome wrote: post #31

This may be a naive question, but how many websites are actually static these days?

Not a ton. But the idea here is you use javascript to call an API for your dynamic content. This way your javascript/css/images are all setup on a CDN that you don't have to manage.

Re: Netlify raises $30M to replace webservers with Application Delivery Network

#37

Post by StavrosK »

I use Netlify for all my static sites and it's been amazing. All I have to do is push and they take care of everything else, I can't understate how much I love the product. If you want to check out a live deployment, my website https://www.stavros.io/ is on Netlify.

I especially like how they provide forms, lambdas and very easy testing by just pushing to another git branch. I don't see why anyone would use Github/Gitlab pages when Netlify exists.

Re: Netlify raises $30M to replace webservers with Application Delivery Network

#38

Post by tyingq »

StavrosK wrote: post #34
tyingq wrote: post #26

I wonder if Cloudflare has plans to compete in this space. If they added it to the $20/month plan, it might push more conversion from the free plan.

I asked them once, and they seemed pretty adamant about not hosting content. Then again, with the IPFS gateway they just added, you can pretty easily do that.

Their (newish) cache API, and worker-kv API seem to be all the foundation you would need.

Basically, it feels like they would need to make a nice UI and perhaps some connectors for github, etc.

Re: Netlify raises $30M to replace webservers with Application Delivery Network

#39

Post by jchrisa »

tome wrote: post #31

This may be a naive question, but how many websites are actually static these days?

The model of deploying a single page app that calls serverless endpoints and cloud databases, has architectural reasons to be preferred. Multi-cloud is a great way to be robust to cloud failures, and have better negotiating leverage with your utility vendor. I wrote a blog post about using Netlify with FaunaDB to build multi-cloud serverless applications here: https://fauna.com/blog/survive-cloud-vendor-crashes-with-net...
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