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Netlify Dev

netlify.com

101–110 of 237 posts

Re: Netlify Dev

#101
post #31

Can anyone explain the elevator pitch of Netlify to me? I know it's become quite popular in the last couple of years and I can't figure out why. I don't doubt that it's good at what it does, but it seems to do the same thing as any number of services. For example, I see a lot of people talk about it for static sites. But you get free static sites through GitHub, nearly free static sites on Amazon S3. What does Netlif…

Hosting on GitHub personally worries me because it isn't their core business.

Hosting on S3 is cheap and I know there are tools to help me, but it's complicated to set up.

Netlify hits the sweet spot by being integrated with git, so you still have to be somewhat technical, but taking care of of a bunch of devopsy stuff. Things that their customers either don't know to do or don't want to. For example I thought about setting up let's encrypt for my personal site, but netlify has that figured out.

Re: Netlify Dev

#102
post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hmm, you right. You could also build a Dropbox clone yourself quite trivially by getting an FTP account, mounting it locally with curlftpfs, and then using SVN or CVS on the mounted filesystem.

Lol I walked into that, I admit it. But Dropbox is something for laymen and casual consumers, it had a massive convenience quotient — Dokku and Netlify (and surge.sh and Heroku, etc) are for developers specifically, and git pushing to website generator is more or less the same experience with all of those services. There isn’t a gulf of difference between using Netlify and creating a Dokku droplet on DigitalOcean...…

[deleted]

Re: Netlify Dev

#103
post #95

I’m curious if anyone has used both Netlify and AWS Amplify and if they can do a quick compare and contrast? In some ways they seem very similar, but their messaging seems fairly different. Disclaimer: I’m a JAMstack n00b and the last real web app I built was “old school” where we did crazy things like keep a session token around and server the HTML, CSS, and JS from a web app. As such, I may be slow on the uptake.

Netlify is focused on delivering your frontend and has some light backend features added on (form submission, lambda functions, auth). But you can't run a dynamic application on just netlify, because there is no database. But you might not need a database, which I think is netlify's proposition. AWS Amplify is focused on providing you a backend (with GraphQL) powered by AWS services (dynamoDB, lambda). You can run an…

Netlify has integration with FaunaDB for the database tier.

Re: Netlify Dev

#104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, without their free tier they probably wouldn't be as big as they are today. It's the same model as freemium apps: get big, then start charging.

You justified a free tier but not why it's still free for one of the most trafficked websites in the world. ;)

They probably get away with a lot since these sites are static. Static sites are a wonderful thing indeed.

Re: Netlify Dev

#105
post #31

Can anyone explain the elevator pitch of Netlify to me? I know it's become quite popular in the last couple of years and I can't figure out why. I don't doubt that it's good at what it does, but it seems to do the same thing as any number of services. For example, I see a lot of people talk about it for static sites. But you get free static sites through GitHub, nearly free static sites on Amazon S3. What does Netlif…

It's basically Heroku for the static generated site ecosystem.

I'm currently building a Gatsby/React site for a small grocery store chain, Netlify makes the process easy with hooks, cli, and many things I found on Heroku. Sure, I could host it elsewhere that has an S3 service but then I have to worry about configuration.

Re: Netlify Dev

#106
post #95

I’m curious if anyone has used both Netlify and AWS Amplify and if they can do a quick compare and contrast? In some ways they seem very similar, but their messaging seems fairly different. Disclaimer: I’m a JAMstack n00b and the last real web app I built was “old school” where we did crazy things like keep a session token around and server the HTML, CSS, and JS from a web app. As such, I may be slow on the uptake.

Netlify is focused on delivering your frontend and has some light backend features added on (form submission, lambda functions, auth). But you can't run a dynamic application on just netlify, because there is no database. But you might not need a database, which I think is netlify's proposition. AWS Amplify is focused on providing you a backend (with GraphQL) powered by AWS services (dynamoDB, lambda). You can run an…

i think AWS' GraphQL backend is a different service called AppSync? but they are often comarketed.

Re: Netlify Dev

#107
post #106
post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Netlify is focused on delivering your frontend and has some light backend features added on (form submission, lambda functions, auth). But you can't run a dynamic application on just netlify, because there is no database. But you might not need a database, which I think is netlify's proposition. AWS Amplify is focused on providing you a backend (with GraphQL) powered by AWS services (dynamoDB, lambda). You can run an…

i think AWS' GraphQL backend is a different service called AppSync? but they are often comarketed.

Oh oops yeah I had no idea these where different things. I have only used AppSync.

Re: Netlify Dev

#108
post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One feature I haven't seen in the comments here is the ability to just drag and drop an entire website folder from your harddisk to Netlify and it's live within seconds. Which worked great for a couple of older personal websites I had. Second feature that is great is that you can use the cli to perform a draft deploy, which generates a unique public URL which you can share with your testers/marketeers/writers/transla…

Welcome to 1997! This is how Geocities, Tripod etc worked back then (I think geocities.ws has FTP access too, for the complete experience). Amazing to see the web coming full circle even on this.

Heh, I'm old enough to remember that experience!

But yeah, it's basically like that but with some more modern features like being able to do this from a browser (no filezilla required!) and better control over HTTP headers and such.

Re: Netlify Dev

#109
post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One feature I haven't seen in the comments here is the ability to just drag and drop an entire website folder from your harddisk to Netlify and it's live within seconds. Which worked great for a couple of older personal websites I had. Second feature that is great is that you can use the cli to perform a draft deploy, which generates a unique public URL which you can share with your testers/marketeers/writers/transla…

Welcome to 1997! This is how Geocities, Tripod etc worked back then (I think geocities.ws has FTP access too, for the complete experience). Amazing to see the web coming full circle even on this.

I have seen those exact words to describe Netlify - it's like Geocities, but for the modern web. I have yet to try it out for myself, but I'm thinking I may use it to get a personal site up and running since I have a tendency to take the power of running my own site on my own VPS a bit too far by changing it up (and usually breaking it) frequently...

Re: Netlify Dev

#110
post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Netlify is focused on delivering your frontend and has some light backend features added on (form submission, lambda functions, auth). But you can't run a dynamic application on just netlify, because there is no database. But you might not need a database, which I think is netlify's proposition. AWS Amplify is focused on providing you a backend (with GraphQL) powered by AWS services (dynamoDB, lambda). You can run an…

Netlify has integration with FaunaDB for the database tier.

FaunaDB looks like a great product for a serverless/SPA type app but I don't see how they are integrated with netlify other than they fit together well?
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