Like Heroku, Porter takes care of a lot of generic DevOps work for you (like setting up CI/CD, containerizing your applications, autoscaling, SSL certificates, setting up a reverse proxy) and lets you deploy your apps with a few clicks — saving you a lot of time while developing. However, as you probably know, there’s a downside: platforms like this become constraining if and when your app takes off and you need to scale. The time you saved while developing can get pretty expensive once you’re paying for a lot of users — and the platforms tend to try to keep you locked in!
Our idea is to give you the best of both worlds: use Porter Cloud for as long as it saves you time and development cost, but at any time you can press the “eject button” to migrate your app to your own AWS, Azure, or GCP account as you please. We make it seamless to break out, so you’re no longer subject to the rigid constraints of a conventional PaaS. You can migrate in a few simple steps outlined here: https://docs.porter.run/other/eject.
A bit of background: we first launched on HN almost 3 years ago with our original product (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26993421, https://porter.run), which deploys your applications to your own AWS, Azure, or GCP account with the simple experience of a PaaS.
Since then, we’ve helped countless companies migrate from a PaaS to one of the big three cloud providers. Most of them had gotten started on a PaaS in the early days to optimize for speed and ease of use, but ultimately had to go through a painful migration to AWS, Azure, or GCP as they scaled and ran into various constraints on their original PaaS.
Interestingly, we learned that many companies that start on a PaaS are fully aware that they’ll have to migrate to one of the big three public clouds [1] at some point. Yet they choose to deploy on a PaaS anyway because outgrowing a cloud platform is a “champagne problem” when you’re focused on getting something off the ground. This, however, becomes a very tangible problem when you need to migrate your entire production infrastructure while serving many users at scale. It’s a “nice problem to have”, until it isn’t.
We’ve built Porter Cloud so that the next generation of startups can get off the ground as quickly as possible, with a peace of mind that you can effortlessly move to one of the tried and true hyperscalers when you are ready to scale.
We are excited to see what people build on Porter Cloud. If you’ve ever dealt with a migration from a PaaS to one of the big three cloud providers, we’d also love to hear about your experience in the comments. Looking forward to feedback and discussion!
[1] By “big three clouds” we mean the lower-level primitives of each cloud provider. We don’t mean their higher level offerings like AWS App Runner, Google Cloud Run, or Azure App Service, since those run into the same PaaS problems described above.