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Show HN: Alicorn Cloud – Easily move between AWS, GCP and Azure

alicorncloud.io

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Re: Show HN: Alicorn Cloud – Easily move between AWS, GCP and Azure

#11

Post by igorzij »

debarshri wrote: post #4

Is 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…

re data migration: yes, that's hard. we are leaving that to the user for now - but with infra out of the way this still makes it radically easier to move. more importantly, approaches to data migration are few and established, whereas infra is bespoke effort

re monetization / permutation: we think we've solved this by having PaaS as the first step. that means we can provide defaults that we know how to handle end-to-end. the differences in modern SaaS stacks aren't that dramatic, and by making a few established patterns super easy to follow we can achieve high degree of uniformity

Re: Show HN: Alicorn Cloud – Easily move between AWS, GCP and Azure

#12

Post by debarshri »

igorzij wrote: post #11
debarshri wrote: post #4

Is 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…

re data migration: yes, that's hard. we are leaving that to the user for now - but with infra out of the way this still makes it radically easier to move. more importantly, approaches to data migration are few and established, whereas infra is bespoke effort re monetization / permutation: we think we've solved this by having PaaS as the first step. that means we can provide defaults that we know how to handle end-to-…

Look, I am not sure if you are trying to be VC backed or not. But I think you can have a decent sized business with 10 people or so. But the market is really really small and it is red ocean. There is lot of people doing the same thing, like porter.dev, quovery, etc.

When we were doing this, what we saw was the moment a company becomes serious they will decide to do all of this themselves. Companies want to own the IaC which you are taking away. Cool aspect of the platform is actually the negative thing from an enterprise point of view. I think it will impact LTV.

They want to own their own terraform script. Scripts you are generating can be written in matter of minutes by seasoned devops engineer. There is not really a moat.

Re: Show HN: Alicorn Cloud – Easily move between AWS, GCP and Azure

#14

Post by milesward »

igorzij wrote: post #8
skafoi wrote: post #6

Do 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.

Try Alternator from ScyllaDB to break that lock :)

Re: Show HN: Alicorn Cloud – Easily move between AWS, GCP and Azure

#16

Post by SynasterBeiter »

Cool concept, but I have a couple of unanswered questions.

- The docs link to digger and I don't really understand what Alicorn is. Is it just a GUI for resources defined using digger?

- The digger docs look unfinished, e.g https://learn.digger.dev/overview/understanding-targets is missing.

- From my understanding, to achieve cloud-agnostic infrastructure specification, digger abstracts the individual pieces of the infrastructure to things like Components and Resources. It then uses these abstractions to generate Terraform (and k8s) files for a given cloud provider. But where is this mapping between, say, a resource and a piece of terraform config for AWS? Do I have to provide it? What's the point, then? Does digger offer some already-prepared Resources? If yes, where?

- Having an example setup would really help to understand.

Re: Show HN: Alicorn Cloud – Easily move between AWS, GCP and Azure

#18

Post by debarshri »

I signed up for your service - two things I noticed. One, the github was authenticating with app called digger.dev by motatoes and not alicorn, the page I landed on. Also, it took me to app.digger.dev, felt like bait and switch.

I created an app. It has been stuck in deploying state for 9 hours now[1]

You can't say that I didn't give your product a fair shot. I might conclude that I have trust issues with your product.

Anyways, congratulation on your producthunt campaign!

[1] https://ibb.co/vqf3HBm

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