Show HN: Alicorn Cloud – Easily move between AWS, GCP and Azure
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Re: Show HN: Alicorn Cloud – Easily move between AWS, GCP and Azure
#2Hi HN! We've built Alicorn to allow startups escape vendor lock-in with their cloud providers.
AWS, GCP or Azure – with Alicorn your stack runs anywhere. Switch cloud providers in one click and never run out of free credits!
For a while it's been possible to build "portable" stacks that are easy to move across cloud providers. AWS, GCP and Azure nowadays are almost identical; they just don't want you to think this way. Docker, Kubernetes, functions, Redis, Postgres, Kafka, ElasticSearch – the building blocks are exactly the same. The problem is, it takes more work.
Alicorn does the plumbing on AWS, GCP or Azure for you – so that your stack runs anywhere. This means you are no longer tied to your cloud provider!
- Escape vendor lock-in – switch cloud providers in one click - Use free credits from all 3 major providers. This means 3 years free - Deploy containers, webapps, functions, databases, storage, etc - Get DevOps best practices out of the box, like Terraform and CI / CD - Best in class hosted free tier with 8gb RAM - you can actually run production on it
Our ProductHunt launch: https://www.producthunt.com/posts/alicorn-cloud
Re: Show HN: Alicorn Cloud – Easily move between AWS, GCP and Azure
#3Sounds interesting. Currently, we provide TiloDB on AWS serverless, and could also port it to GCP fairly easily. We cannot yet go to Azure, as they lack some equivalent technologies.
What are your thoughts on serverless?
Re: Show HN: Alicorn Cloud – Easily move between AWS, GCP and Azure
#4Is it a PaaS on top of kubernetes? I mean if you want to be cloud agnostic, you can use kubernetes.
Having tried to build a PaaS like experience, the value proposition that you are proposing is actually a self fulfilling prophecy. Just moving containers and apps is not enough. Large scale data migration from buckets to databases is super expensive and non trivial. One of situations that is quite commons is canary migration, where they would like to run both cloud providers and slowly phase one out. That is non-trivial too. Certificates starts become invalid, the migration is also dictated by how the apps are written too.
Also, startup are fairly easy to acquire but very hard to monetize for the amount of effort that would go into building everything resilient. I think biggest problem is the sheer amount of permutation and combination of things.
Re: Show HN: Alicorn Cloud – Easily move between AWS, GCP and Azure
#5Is it a PaaS on top of kubernetes? I mean if you want to be cloud agnostic, you can use kubernetes. Having tried to build a PaaS like experience, the value proposition that you are proposing is actually a self fulfilling prophecy. Just moving containers and apps is not enough. Large scale data migration from buckets to databases is super expensive and non trivial. One of situations that is quite commons is canary mig…
A bit more complex than that :) PaaS on top of K8S have a problem of serving no one - because for small cases they're too heavy and for large teams too inflexible, they could just as well use K8S directly.
Alicorn actually generates infra-as-code (Terraform) using modular "targets". By default for container it uses managed engine provided by the cloud provider which costs way less than a dedicated K8S cluster (on AWS that'd be Fargate)
But K8S is fully supported too - when you create an environment you can pick a Kubernetes target and get a cluster
Re: Show HN: Alicorn Cloud – Easily move between AWS, GCP and Azure
#6Do you also offer some kind of abstraction libraries when e.g. working with DynamoDB on AWS and then switching to GCP? Or would I still have to prepare my code for that?
Re: Show HN: Alicorn Cloud – Easily move between AWS, GCP and Azure
#7Sounds interesting. Currently, we provide TiloDB on AWS serverless, and could also port it to GCP fairly easily. We cannot yet go to Azure, as they lack some equivalent technologies. What are your thoughts on serverless?
We support Serverless too - Alicorn has a concept of Targets which are essentially different ways to run your backend code. You can mix & match Serverless, standalone containers and K8S.
Under the hood Alicorn generates Terraform, which you can also customise. So you get a proper DevOps setup out of the box with the convenienc of Serverless but way more power if you need it
Re: Show HN: Alicorn Cloud – Easily move between AWS, GCP and Azure
#8Do you also offer some kind of abstraction libraries when e.g. working with DynamoDB on AWS and then switching to GCP? Or would I still have to prepare my code for that?
Things like Dynamo are AWS-specific, it is their way of locking you in. You could use MongoDB or Cassandra (which is right depends on what you use it for) that would work in any cloud provider. Moreover, for 90% of use cases the capabilities of good old PostgreSQL are more than sufficient, even if you store JSON in it and use it like a document DB.
Re: Show HN: Alicorn Cloud – Easily move between AWS, GCP and Azure
#9Really cool, that's exactly what I would except the next generation after Heroku to look like. It's weird that Heroku is still so popular while being so expensive and with a product that hasn't improved in years..
Re: Show HN: Alicorn Cloud – Easily move between AWS, GCP and Azure
#10Really cool, that's exactly what I would except the next generation after Heroku to look like. It's weird that Heroku is still so popular while being so expensive and with a product that hasn't improved in years..
Yeah PaaS like Vercel and Heroku have an inherent limitation - at some point you need to move off them because the industry has moved on and you can only do so much without things like infra-as-code and kubernetes that became industry standard.
At the same time, simplicity is needed more then ever - k8s is cool but now people are spending crazy amounts of time and money to set up the devops goodness to run simple apps
So we thought, why not have both simplicity and power? We're just making the deeper layers of configuration optional, but still accessible.