My 2 cents, having been in the space for a while and then pivoting out of it. All devops first engineers thinking this is a problem, building something that is more like PaaS but then soon you will realise now not only you have convince engineering managers but also engineers. The total addressable market is fairly small for this type of product, you can throw in compliance guard rails but when an org becomes big they will leave your platform. If you find a customer, you should charge 100 or more as your long value is fairly small. Do checkout the list of PaaS here [1]
Launch HN: Nullstone (YC W22) – An easier way to deploy and manage cloud apps
61–67 of 67 posts
Re: Launch HN: Nullstone (YC W22) – An easier way to deploy and manage cloud apps
#62My 2 cents, having been in the space for a while and then pivoting out of it. All devops first engineers thinking this is a problem, building something that is more like PaaS but then soon you will realise now not only you have convince engineering managers but also engineers. The total addressable market is fairly small for this type of product, you can throw in compliance guard rails but when an org becomes big the…
Thanks for the feedback!
We have seen the same with our customers and our own experiences -- most teams "graduate" from a PaaS because you're locked into a set of proprietary technologies and hosting.
When they do get large enough, they leave to build their own infrastructure. Unfortunately, they have to rebuild much of the automation and user experience that a PaaS provided for them.
It's fair to call us a PaaS given our launch, but our vision is to give teams automation and collaboration in their own tooling and workflows.
Re: Launch HN: Nullstone (YC W22) – An easier way to deploy and manage cloud apps
#63$100/user/mo seems like way too much. The “contributing code that is deployed through Nullstone”. Makes it sound like you have to pay for the whole engineering team even if only a few devs are actually handling the deployments. Is that true?
That's correct that the entire engineering team is on the platform. I appreciate the feedback and perhaps the post didn't message this well.
There are many value-adds that developers use from the platform beyond deployments like a monitoring/status dashboards, access control, and preview environments.
Many of our customers use our platform as a DevOps platform. We've seen many engineering teams hire 1 DevOps engineer per 10 software engineers (this varies based on industry and tech complexity). We chose to price the offering based on the value we're driving to each developer.
Re: Launch HN: Nullstone (YC W22) – An easier way to deploy and manage cloud apps
#64My 2 cents, having been in the space for a while and then pivoting out of it. All devops first engineers thinking this is a problem, building something that is more like PaaS but then soon you will realise now not only you have convince engineering managers but also engineers. The total addressable market is fairly small for this type of product, you can throw in compliance guard rails but when an org becomes big the…
Thanks for the feedback! We have seen the same with our customers and our own experiences -- most teams "graduate" from a PaaS because you're locked into a set of proprietary technologies and hosting. When they do get large enough, they leave to build their own infrastructure. Unfortunately, they have to rebuild much of the automation and user experience that a PaaS provided for them. It's fair to call us a PaaS give…
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Re: Launch HN: Nullstone (YC W22) – An easier way to deploy and manage cloud apps
#65My 2 cents, having been in the space for a while and then pivoting out of it. All devops first engineers thinking this is a problem, building something that is more like PaaS but then soon you will realise now not only you have convince engineering managers but also engineers. The total addressable market is fairly small for this type of product, you can throw in compliance guard rails but when an org becomes big the…
Thanks for the feedback! We have seen the same with our customers and our own experiences -- most teams "graduate" from a PaaS because you're locked into a set of proprietary technologies and hosting. When they do get large enough, they leave to build their own infrastructure. Unfortunately, they have to rebuild much of the automation and user experience that a PaaS provided for them. It's fair to call us a PaaS give…
Ok, let me give you 2 more cents on that. When we had pivoted, to pivoted to automation, tooling and workflows, if-then-then-that framework with webhook and github hook etc. Exactly what you are pitching. That has another set of challenges. It is very hard to sell and motivate engineering teams to use a product like that, forget about even monetizing it. It is what I call the chasm. You get some revenue but not enough to get a breakthrough. One of the insights we had, is that you have to become an enterprise product and you have to let go of consumer-like or product led approach you have in the product. Also, the ICP of your current product is probably not the ICP of the automation product you are building, the learning from the current iteration is not transferrable.
I have lot of cuts in this space. Feel free to reach out to me.
Re: Launch HN: Nullstone (YC W22) – An easier way to deploy and manage cloud apps
#66Hi - I'm a cofounder of https://controlplane.com
I played with nullstone and it has some good elements but I didn't love it. It felt heavy, slow and the resulting infra isn't inexpensive.
We built Control Plane to give developers instant cloud-native maturity, allowing them to run their apps/services in a portable way, whether on AWS, Azure, GCP, Linode, Hetzner, Equinix, Oracle, on-premises or anywhere else. In fact you can run on 100 locations on 20 different providers with the same exact ease of use as running on localhost. no kidding!
On Control Plane you get instant multi-region, whether on one cloud, or multiple provider - with a TLS endpoints for your domain(s). You can configure subdomain based routing or path-based routing. You get consolidated (across regions) logs, metrics, tracing, alerting, audit trail, secrets management, service discovery across multiple locations, mutual TLS across services, service mesh, free image repository, all the observability you need and much more. It is the same exact effort to run in one region or a hundred. Geo-routing to the nearest region is baked in and so is automatic failover.
What's more, you can define IAM permissions in one place and move the workload across clouds while still consuming the UNION of ANY of the hundreds of services from AWS, GCP and Azure - without dealing with credentials and with least privilege/zero trust. In other words, you can be running on prem and still consume RDS, S3, SQS, SNS, DynamoDB, Big Query, Spanner, CosmosDB or ANY of the hyper-scalers' services from a single workload - regardless of where it runs.
In terms of cost, we don't charge by developer. We charge by MILLICORE of CPU and MB of RAM and your workload can scale based on many scaling strategies you choose from.
A typical node.js, GoLang or Rust app will cost you less than $2.00 per month per region when you enable Capacity AI, a technology built to optimize the consumption in an automated way - if you choose 10 regions, it will cost you $20. You don't pay for load balancers, NAT gateways, Internet gateways, K8s, secrets, certs, logs, metrics, tracing, etc. We are told it is the most cost effective way to run microservices or any other containerized apps. While you can run completely serverless (not as in Lambda, but as in no need to deal with servers or cloud accounts) - you can also bring your own account (or bare metal hardware in your basemet) and Control Plane-fy your account or hardware. When you bring your own account you do pay for NAT gateways, load balancers, internet gateways and K8s worker nodes (you don't pay for brain nodes). The platform optimizes and auto-scales your cluster automatically so you pay the least amount, regardless of hosting infrastructure.
While it is very inexpensive, I am more than happy to give free credits - just email me at doron at controlplane.com
Re: Launch HN: Nullstone (YC W22) – An easier way to deploy and manage cloud apps
#67The product is interesting for an individual! However, my company will not accept product that are charged per user. I am based in Hong Kong, and often in Asia, we are hiring with engineers working remotely from Southeast Asia, due to a very low pricing per head.
It would be better if it's a total cost. In this way we could just put it side to side with our cloud billing.