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Launch HN: Diversion (YC S22) – Cloud-Native Git Alternative

news.ycombinator.com

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Re: Launch HN: Diversion (YC S22) – Cloud-Native Git Alternative

#401

Post by ryanlitalien »

maccard wrote: post #350
ryanlitalien wrote: post #347

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hi, why the switch? Purely cost? Or admin overhead?

Yes, to both. P4 itself is solid, but it's a very chatty protocol and is very latency sensitive. Running a master in the us, with clients in europe is painful for everyone involved. Replicas and edge servers come with other tradeoffs too. As a developer, doing things like "I only want this subtree of the stream" is hard. Virtual streams exist, but they have a (non-negligible) overhead on the server. It has some quirk…

Lightweight branching is coming "soon" and will help this exact issue. Contact me for more info.

Re: Launch HN: Diversion (YC S22) – Cloud-Native Git Alternative

#402

Post by ryanlitalien »

maccard wrote: post #399
Arelius wrote: post #394

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed. It's also expensive, and support has been lacking. We'd much prefer something we could maintain and fix ourselves.

Of all the complaints I have about p4, support is actually one I'm ok with. They've pretty consistently helped me fix issues over the years (plenty of which are bugs on their side that they have fixed after I raised it). Their sla is good, and their engineers are usually good at troubleshooting. They are wildly, wildly expensive though.

That totally depends on where you put value. We're a fraction of other companies licenses for comparison. Also, we have new pricing for our new Helix Core Cloud SaaS product!

Re: Launch HN: Diversion (YC S22) – Cloud-Native Git Alternative

#403

Post by sasham »

withinboredom wrote: post #253
spacebanana7 wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This sounds like a classic innovator's dilemma style division in the market. The incumbents need to cater to existing customers with a need to host their own servers for licensing reasons; but this forbids them from using cloud native features in the core of their products. There may well be space for a newcomer to make a cloud only product targeted at the subset of studios that have the legal ability to use the clou…

My understanding from reading much of OPs responses is that “the cloud” may be vendor locked to AWS. There are serious issues there to hosting your code on servers most likely owned by a competitor. E-Commerce, video streaming, games, AI, video production, electronics, retail, pharmaceuticals, logistics, publishing, etc. Like they literally picked the worst vendor to build this on.

Why the worst? Microsoft is a more serious competitor to game studios with Xbox Game Studios and now Activision Blizzard. (And yet they do use Azure).

You definitely have a point reg vendor lock, we've planned for this and Diversion will be able to run in any cloud and on-prem in the future (we are running it in containers now).

Re: Launch HN: Diversion (YC S22) – Cloud-Native Git Alternative

#404

Post by sasham »

lemome wrote: post #25
sasham wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Totally right, perforce is used by almost all large game studios. But it's painful to use for smaller studios and indie devs - it requires managing your own server with configuration, backups, networking etc. It's also not great for cloud based workflows and remote work, and super expensive with rigid licensing.

Most of the time we need to host our own servers for licensing issues, you might need to consider a "on premises" option if you want to be an viable option for a lot of studios.

That's interesting!! Does the license prohibit any use of cloud to store the assets? Or private cloud is OK?

Re: Launch HN: Diversion (YC S22) – Cloud-Native Git Alternative

#405

Post by iveqy »

myfonj wrote: post #234

Out of curiosity, are there any VCSs that operate on AST instead of plaintext lines? (Or is something like this being developed or proven impossible?) I guess it should be possible to cooperate on shared codebase without need for every contributor to check in and out text files following exactly the same formatting. Or even naming convention. Or even same language, provided all collaborators can transpile to and from…

PlasticSCM has semantic merge that does something like that: https://docs.plasticscm.com/semanticmerge/intro-guide/semant...

Re: Launch HN: Diversion (YC S22) – Cloud-Native Git Alternative

#406

Post by sasham »

Arelius wrote: post #276
sasham wrote: post #271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hi, sure thing! You can get extra storage at the same price as the Free tier (we'll make it clearer on the website).

Ahh, I see it... Being in the free tier, it also just looks like a feature, I might pull the price/100GB/mo into it's own cell to make it more clear. It is a pricing page afterall.

Done!

Re: Launch HN: Diversion (YC S22) – Cloud-Native Git Alternative

#407

Post by sasham »

itslennysfault wrote: post #246

Little feedback on the "how is it different from Perforce" section of the web page. There have to be more advantages than "it's in the cloud" ...right? Also, for many this is potentially a huge hurdle / disadvantage. Who are you, and why should we trust you with our precious IP / code? (many game studios are on-prem very intentionally) Personally, I'm currently (being forced to) use Perforce and I've learned to toler…

The advantages are that it's much easier to set up, manage and use, and less expensive. You're right, the FAQ should reflect this better.

Re: Launch HN: Diversion (YC S22) – Cloud-Native Git Alternative

#408

Post by sasham »

grogenaut wrote: post #254
itslennysfault wrote: post #246

Little feedback on the "how is it different from Perforce" section of the web page. There have to be more advantages than "it's in the cloud" ...right? Also, for many this is potentially a huge hurdle / disadvantage. Who are you, and why should we trust you with our precious IP / code? (many game studios are on-prem very intentionally) Personally, I'm currently (being forced to) use Perforce and I've learned to toler…

For me the absurd size of data in the game I worked on, terrabytes of video, mocap data, assets, made cloud hard and expensive. Cloud makes me think of all that time I'm blocked on network up and my poor data caps for my employees

Thanks for the feedback! Transfer is a challenge for sure. Can I ask how do you do remote work with on-prem?

Re: Launch HN: Diversion (YC S22) – Cloud-Native Git Alternative

#409

Post by sasham »

lulznews wrote: post #381

Cool! For my own edification: how did you validate this idea before building? It sounds like the kind of thing you would have to convince people they need. Or am I wrong and people were telling you they needed this?

Like any validation - LOTS and LOTS user interviews. We found out that general software devs are mostly ok with git (many of them hate it, but they manage). They are interested in real-time collaboration features that we can offer, but these are not enough to become 1st users before there's a good ecosystem. Meanwhile, in game development some are desperately looking for a better VCS. This is why we're starting there.

Re: Launch HN: Diversion (YC S22) – Cloud-Native Git Alternative

#410

Post by sasham »

rstat1 wrote: post #320

I was interested enough to go look at your page. I didn't find any ways to download a server package to run locally and immediately lost interest.

Sorry, currently we're only offering Diversion as SaaS. I understand that some may prefer to self-host, this might be an option in the future.
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