Netlify for the frontend, Micro for the backend • Hacker News Board

Re: Netlify for the frontend, Micro for the backend

#11

Post by XzAeRosho » Thu, Nov 12, 2020, 1:06 PM UTC

asim wrote: post #10

Hi HN! Asim here. Founder CEO of Micro. We've been working on M3O for some time now and excited to not only share it with the world but help understand our positioning amongst other technology such as Netlify and the frontend. Happy to answer any questions.

Just minor feedback.

Was looking for the pricing, and the description for the paid tier is kind of vague when mentioning "2x Increased resource limits". 2x increase compared to what?

Otherwise, looks really nice and will give it a spin this weekend.

Re: Netlify for the frontend, Micro for the backend

#12

Post by asim » Thu, Nov 12, 2020, 1:10 PM UTC

XzAeRosho wrote: post #11

asim wrote: post #10

Hi HN! Asim here. Founder CEO of Micro. We've been working on M3O for some time now and excited to not only share it with the world but help understand our positioning amongst other technology such as Netlify and the frontend. Happy to answer any questions.

Just minor feedback. Was looking for the pricing, and the description for the paid tier is kind of vague when mentioning "2x Increased resource limits". 2x increase compared to what? Otherwise, looks really nice and will give it a spin this weekend.

Thanks. It's in the docs but I'll link to it below pricing for clarity. It's 1 core, 1gb mem by default for the whole namespace.

Re: Netlify for the frontend, Micro for the backend

#13

Post by Xevi » Thu, Nov 12, 2020, 1:12 PM UTC

XzAeRosho wrote: post #11

asim wrote: post #10

Hi HN! Asim here. Founder CEO of Micro. We've been working on M3O for some time now and excited to not only share it with the world but help understand our positioning amongst other technology such as Netlify and the frontend. Happy to answer any questions.

Just minor feedback. Was looking for the pricing, and the description for the paid tier is kind of vague when mentioning "2x Increased resource limits". 2x increase compared to what? Otherwise, looks really nice and will give it a spin this weekend.

I was also a bit confused by this. The front page says that the pricing structure is simple, but they tell you nothing about what you're paying for...

I had to go to the docs to find an answer.

https://docs.m3o.com/faq#dev

Re: Netlify for the frontend, Micro for the backend

#14

Post by clafferty » Thu, Nov 12, 2020, 1:14 PM UTC

Bravo m3o, this looks awesome!

Netlifys approach to static sites seemed like a no brainer since HTML is easy to host. They added lots of sugar around that to make it effortless and easy. So M3o seems like a great idea.

Micro on the other hand will need some buy in but I'll definitely consider it since we use Go already.

One concern is your pricing seems too reasonable (free)!

Re: Netlify for the frontend, Micro for the backend

#15

Post by mindfulmark » Thu, Nov 12, 2020, 1:23 PM UTC

hans0l074 wrote: post #2

When I read about such abstractions and "simplifications" (which usually end up with a 10 box diagram simplified to a 2-3 box diagram), I often hesitate to start building something new, always wondering "Am I doing this in the most " upvoted" way of implementing such a thing? Some of this tech feels like if you switch on, and stare at your monitor long enough, a "Hello World" API will be deployed on the cloud for you…

I think it's a good point and something I find myself worrying about as well. The hype around GraphQL and Apollo, for example, made me feel that I was losing serious time developing a REST APIs until I finally committed and decided to use it on a project. Obviously there ended up being a lot of trade-offs but in the end it was hard to tell if I saved any time at all. More generally, after falling for this a couple times of I realized that often you're just pushing problems around to different parts of the stack, or hiding complexity in places you'll eventually need to uncover. My experience says that the time consuming parts of building a product are rarely solved by adding flashy new services and libraries, and so I try to worry about these things less. On the other hand, trying out new stuff even just for an hour or two can give you a lot of insight into how much time it's actually going to save you - so worse case you just take it for a test run and see what it's actually all about.

Re: Netlify for the frontend, Micro for the backend

#16

Post by claydavisss » Thu, Nov 12, 2020, 1:35 PM UTC

"Fixing" what already worked just fine.

You've topped out as a developer if you are spending time swapping out your architecture for "jamstack". What have you changed? Nothing but the plumbing. Up your game and spend your time on real progress.

Re: Netlify for the frontend, Micro for the backend

#17

Post by siscia » Thu, Nov 12, 2020, 1:37 PM UTC

rishav_sharan wrote: post #7

What about the database? All these Jamstack articles always seem to skip past a db in their examples and I have never seen an "app" without an associated database. Or is the KV store supposed to act like an app database?

I worked a bit on this space, mostly for https://simplesql.redbeardlab.com/ (not running at the moment, but if folks would like to test it, please leave your email or contact me) and https://redisql.com

KV is the simplest thing you can provide, but in general it is hard to build applications on top of it, especially with changing requirements. KV means basically that all your query and way to interact with the storage must be well-known in advance. While with SQL, all your data is there and it is fast to add an index.

The problem with the solution above are the wrapper for libraries, nobody want to write a django or rails app, and integrate with an HTTP service for the database.

But maybe people are willing to do so for micro...

Re: Netlify for the frontend, Micro for the backend

#18

Post by asim » Thu, Nov 12, 2020, 1:55 PM UTC

clafferty wrote: post #14

Bravo m3o, this looks awesome! Netlifys approach to static sites seemed like a no brainer since HTML is easy to host. They added lots of sugar around that to make it effortless and easy. So M3o seems like a great idea. Micro on the other hand will need some buy in but I'll definitely consider it since we use Go already. One concern is your pricing seems too reasonable (free)!

Thanks for the feedback. And yes we're learning and iterating on pricing. I think the key will be fair usage policy and resource limits that allow people to scale with their usage. We'll also work on additional pricing tiers for larger teams which I think will be more appropriate. Theres a lot we can't do on $35/user/month. But it's a start!

Re: Netlify for the frontend, Micro for the backend

#19

Post by friendly_chap » Thu, Nov 12, 2020, 2:16 PM UTC

rishav_sharan wrote: post #7

What about the database? All these Jamstack articles always seem to skip past a db in their examples and I have never seen an "app" without an associated database. Or is the KV store supposed to act like an app database?

Yeah there is a KV store which is more lower level and an ORM like library on top, check this: https://github.com/micro/dev/tree/master/model

Re: Netlify for the frontend, Micro for the backend

#20

Post by jfengel » Thu, Nov 12, 2020, 2:20 PM UTC

Your page doesn't show any of the backend code being deployed. I don't even know what language it's in.

So it's a little hard for me to compare it to Netlify, which does have backend support in the form of lambdas, and a database in the form of FaunaDB. That's fairly limited, but it's also very easy.

Clicking through to the github page, it looks like the examples are in Go... though I also see a Dockerfile. For me, I'd be more interested in having your blurb page focus more on how one writes the back end, since that's what you're really selling.