Is this just a rebranding of digger? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27905922
Yes. We are trying to fucus on one thing at a time now for one specific problem, as opposed to offering a platform that does everything for everyone
Show HN: Alicorn Cloud – Easily move between AWS, GCP and Azure
31–40 of 46 posts
Re: Show HN: Alicorn Cloud – Easily move between AWS, GCP and Azure
#32Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 I…
Thank you! I really appreciate your take on it. Very valid concerns, and we are well aware. Here's the "map of the ocean" we were able to collate over the last few months: https://www.notion.so/diggerdev/Landscape-around-Digger-2e22...
We are indeed VC backed. And we know that it's a tough market to crack. But we also know that the opportunity is enormously large - because the right product could replace a large chunk of DevOps consulting, and from there expand into the holy grail of the "enterprise core". So worth trying.
Yes it can be written in minutes by a seasoned DevOps engineer. But access to seasoned DevOps engineers means either hiring them full-time or paying a huge consulting premium.
Yes people want to own their Terraform - and we encourage that. You can simply connect your repository with TF and Alicorn will do two-way sync.
Re: Show HN: Alicorn Cloud – Easily move between AWS, GCP and Azure
#33The biggest problem with these sorts of “cloud agnostic” approaches is that one is limited to only fairly basic architectures on broadly monolithic apps. The second you want to do something more in depth or customized then this model falls apart quite quickly and you’re back to square one real fast. If you really just want a basic website and that’s all you’ll ever do this might work but outside that pick a platform…
We believe we've cracked "the second you want to customise" problem. We offer 3 levels of customisation below the UI: config file options, Terraform overrides and entirely custom Terraform targets. So it really is fully native, not a black box. All the simplifications are completely optional - you can change whatever you want, whenever you want.
Re: Show HN: Alicorn Cloud – Easily move between AWS, GCP and Azure
#34The biggest problem with these sorts of “cloud agnostic” approaches is that one is limited to only fairly basic architectures on broadly monolithic apps. The second you want to do something more in depth or customized then this model falls apart quite quickly and you’re back to square one real fast. If you really just want a basic website and that’s all you’ll ever do this might work but outside that pick a platform…
The same could be said about all the shenanigans involving cloud and being web scale. For 95% of the companies this will never become a problem and your need to spin up a VM in another part of the world does not justify using an expensive cloud provider like AWS,GCP or Azure.
It's all very relative and depends on your operational complexity. If what you are building is working fine with VMs and you don't see negative impact on your business from operating it yourself, then sure - why fix what's not broken?
But for thousands of small businesses out there, not speaking of medium and large ones, cloud providers replace one or more full time employees who'd otherwise be busy maintaining and supporting their stacks. You can do the math. From that point of view AWS & co are dirt cheap.
Re: Show HN: Alicorn Cloud – Easily move between AWS, GCP and Azure
#35My thought when I saw the name: alicorncloud - alicloud - alibaba cloud
Oops haven't thought of that :) No, no relation to Alibaba or anything from China for that matter.
Re: Show HN: Alicorn Cloud – Easily move between AWS, GCP and Azure
#36In theory this sounds awesome but I have to say that demo was pretty underwhelming. It looks like there's a bunch of configuration that needs to be done to ensure this is set up properly, not the least of which is that the app needs to be running in a Docker container? Thats a non-trivial task that I don't need to do on Heroku. This seems to be targeting smaller, one off, services not full stacks? Can I deploy my who…
Thank you so much for sharing this feedback! Super helpful.
It is actually for full stacks, not individual services. The demo isn't doing a great job showing it indeed.
Re Docker - yes, we don't believe there's any practical reason running backend code without containers in 2021, unless it's serverless functions. It's easy to dockerize pretty much any app, takes minutes and makes your code portable, container registry becomes your artifact store, easy rollbacks, consistency etc.
Connection to DB is done via env variables, automatically mapped from Terraform outputs. Secrets are stored in AWS parameter store or equivalent.
Static assets go to block storage (like s3) and served via cdn (like Cloudfront)
DNS / domains: each service gets its own unique URL in every environment via managed DNS (on AWS it's route53). You can also connect your own domain.
Auth - we don't support that yet, on the roadmap for Q4.
Data transfer - no, that's left to the user. We don't anticipate people doing migrations too often though - we just make the infrastructure part simple.
Thanks again for asking these questions!
Re: Show HN: Alicorn Cloud – Easily move between AWS, GCP and Azure
#37I suspect anyone using this is making a trade off. The downside being that by putting something in between you and the cloud provide you can only use a subset, and any problem could be in two places: the cloud or the middle layer and you have to figure out which.
Very valid concern. But we think we cracked this.
Alicorn uses Terraform under the hood and allows you to customise it however you like. You can think of it as "CI for infrastructure" with meaningful defaults. 90% of the most common tasks are automated, but at the same time it's not a black box, you still have full access to native for the remaining 10%
Re: Show HN: Alicorn Cloud – Easily move between AWS, GCP and Azure
#38GCP free $300 credit only work for 90 days, so not 3 years - but 2.25 years. Azure free $200 credit only work for 30 days, so not 2.25 years - but 1.33 years (if you need credit instead of free 12-month services).
Well... These are amounts for individuals. AWS Activate offers $100k to startups and that's just the advertised amount, $200-300k offers are not uncommon. Google and Microsoft do the exact same thing. They compete to lock you in.
The math really starts working when your cloud bill is $5-10k a month or more. Then you can either foot the bill or hire an extra engineer. There are thousands of startups who'd much prefer to hire another engineer instead.
Re: Show HN: Alicorn Cloud – Easily move between AWS, GCP and Azure
#39GCP free $300 credit only work for 90 days, so not 3 years - but 2.25 years. Azure free $200 credit only work for 30 days, so not 2.25 years - but 1.33 years (if you need credit instead of free 12-month services).
Startups that go through an incubator or that are seed/VC funded typically qualify more free credits. The CSPs offer this in the hope that as the company grows so does their cloud spend. Couple that with the fact that it becomes harder to switch and they more than make up for the initial free credit that was fronted. Alicorn seems to sidestep the incentive model for CSPs entirely, I wonder if they'll add a clause to…
That's exactly what we are aiming at :) We're essentially creating liquidity and making cloud resource a commodity.
Re: Show HN: Alicorn Cloud – Easily move between AWS, GCP and Azure
#40This might have been great for transition for backend for my sendsimple.app thanks for sharing
We'd be happy to help with moving - ping me at igor@alicorncloud.io