Regarding charing % of AWS bill - yes, we're changing that soon. It's going to be flat fee + 10% of AWS bill.

Our free tier covers 90% of vibecoder, freelancer and side-project use-cases though. So probably nothing to worry about unless you're a 2+ person business. And at that point, it's still far less expensive than having a DevOps person or learning all of the 150,000 AWS loopholes yourself.

An alternative to tools lik sst.dev or serverless framework, or a PaaS services like Render.com or Flightcontrol.

Deploys to user's own AWS. IaC-first. Has a PaaS-like console UI.

The best features: auto-generates IaC config by scanning your code. Has built-in EC2 runner which is 2-6x faster than AWS CodeBuild.

We've now also implemented dev mode, which is similar to SST. It deploys parts of the stacks that can't be locally emulated (lambda functions, cognito, etc.) with fast re-deploy, and emulates everything else (containers, SQL databases, Redis, DynamoDb, etc.) locally. This means testing/developing is pretty much free, and you have the fastest feedback loops possible.

Whole Stacktape, and dev mode in particular is also very optimized for coding agents with `--agent` flag.

To try it, run `npx stacktape init`

EDIT: Changed the link to github. Stacktape core is now open-source.

Stacktape is a PaaS that deploy to user's own AWS account.

v3 adds many new features, but namely the ability to generate IaC config directly from code, by analyzing the user's repository (both deterministically and using multiple AI techniques).

For example, if it assumes your application is a Web API that uses Postgres and Redis, it will create a Stacktape IaC config that deploys Fargate container, load balancer, Aurora Serverless v2 Postgres and Elasticache Redis (behind the scenes it will also configure things like networking, VPC, security groups, IAM, etc.)

Launching this weekend.

I like what you're doing. But, to behonst, it's a tough market. While the promise of $265 vs $4 might seem like a no-brainer, you're comparing apples to oranges.

- Your DX is most likely be far from Heroku's. Their developer experience is refined by 100,000s developers. It's hard to think through everything, and you're very unlikely to make it anywhere close, once you go beyond simple use-cases.

- A "single VM" setup is not really production-grade. You're lacking reliability, scalability, redundancy and many more features that these platforms have. It definitely works for low-traffic side-projects. But people or entities that actually have a budget for something like this, and are willing to pay, are usually looking for a different solution.

That being said, I wish you all the luck. Maybe things change it the AI-generated apps era.

It's a Heroku-like PaaS platform that deploys directly to your own AWS account.

It support both serverless (lambda functions), and serverful (AWS ECS Fargate or EC2) deployments. Besides that, it supports other AWS infrastructure resources, such as RDS, Aurora, Redis, ElasticSearch, etc..

You can deploy from console, using git-push-to-deploy, or even use preview deployments (ephemeral environments for every PR).

- Situation on the SWE hiring market. It's way harder to find a job.

- I personally know people from SW dev agencies that are all saying its very hard to find an opportunity (project) to work on.

- In fact, I'm 99% convinced that we're in a recession, even though its not official. Companies are cutting costs left and right. And think about it this way. When a company invests in a software, it's an investment for them, which will eventually pay for itself in a few years. But if the company is struggling to just stay alive, investments are the first thing they cut.

https://stacktape.com is a Heroku/Vercel-like PaaS platform that deploys directly to your own AWS account.

It supports both serverless (lambda functions), and serverful (AWS ECS Fargate or EC2) deployments. Besides that, it supports other AWS infrastructure resources, such as RDS MySQL/Postgres, Redis, ElasticSearch, etc..

You can deploy from console, using git-push-to-deploy, or even use preview deployments (ephemeral environments for every PR).

Compared to alternatives, it's both very easy to use, and flexible/extensible at the same time. You can use it to quickly deploy anything in a few minutes, yet it will be sufficient to cover even complex infrastructure needs you might run into in the future.

If so, do you have any examples, or recommendations?

You can also configure more advanced things, such as Alarms based on selected metrics, budgets based on AWS (forecasted or actual) spend, and also deployment progress notifications. The notifications about these can be sen to your Slack or MSTeams channel, or to an email.

We also support GitOps flows - push-to-branch-to-deploy or even preview deployments (creating ephemeral, short-lived environment for pull requests, that will get automatically deleted when the PR is closed/merged).

That being said, our deployment engine is pretty powerful (in terms of supported AWS infra resources), and it's based on AWS CloudFormation (with a fallback to making native AWS SDK calls to speed up the deployment, when doing the whole CF deployment procedure is not needed). And we do that in a way so that you don't have to worry about CloudFormation drift, or any unexpected surprises.

You can also have a look at https://stacktape.com (full disclosure: I'm a founder). It's a Heroku-like PaaS that deploys to your own AWS account.

We support both serverless and container-based workloads (Fargate and EC2), and many AWS infrastructure (RDS, Aurora, MongoDb, Redis, OpenSearch - ElasticSearch, Bastion servers, etc.).

We're IaC-first but also provide a UI for.

We can do a hans-on assistance with the first deployment, and can also do a custom pricing (as you are a non-profit).

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41670421

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41531233

Points: 4

# Comments: 0

You're asking the right questions that only a few people know they need answers to.

In my opinion, the closest thing to "reclaiming the stack" while still being a PaaS is to use a "deploy to your cloud account" PaaS provider. These services offer the convenience of a PaaS provider, yet allow you to "eject" to using the cloud provider on your own should your use case evolve.

Example services include https://stacktape.com, https://flightcontrol.dev, and https://www.withcoherence.com.

I'm also working on a PaaS comparison site at https://paascout.io.

Disclosure: I am a founder of Stacktape.

There's also a third way, which we're trying to do at stacktape[1].

We've built a PaaS platform on top of AWS, running in your own account. So you get all of the stability, flexibility and reliability of AWS, yet the deployment process is easy as using something like Heroku.

Also, compared to Vercel, the pricing is just a % on top of AWS fees, and not a sudden $10k bill, or $550/TB Netflify egress costs.

[1]: https://stacktape.com

Today, after more than a year in development, we’re introducing the next major version of our product.

During the past few years, we’ve been trying to create a platform that allows developers to deploy their apps entirely on their own without having to do any DevOps.

But this doesn't work in practice. There are too many moving parts. We can abstract 90% of them 90% of the time, but that’s not good enough.

So, we can’t abstract DevOps completely. But we can make it and order-of-magnitude more developer-friendly:

- Writing 100s or 1000s of lines of different YAML files -> write 10s of lines of a simple & concise config

- Having to understand many different technologies (Terraform, Kubernetes, Docker, etc.) and infrastructure concepts (networking, VPCs) -> use 1 technology that includes only easy-to-understand abstractions

- Manual work of deploying & managing apps -> Simple app management in a console UI, including push-to-deploy capabilities, logs browser, infrastructure costs breakdown, one-click-rollbacks, etc.

One thing we're particularly proud of is our config-builder. It’s a monaco-editor (the one powering VSCode) with built-in IntelliSense for Stacktape configuration (autocomplete, validation, on-hover documentation, etc). Prefer GUI? Start with a preset - we have one for most use cases. Then, configure the missing parts using dropdowns, validated input fields, etc. This way, you can configure even the most complicated infrastructures in minutes, and the chance you make a mistake is near zero. You can try it directly on our main website (even though it's even better when it has access to your git repository).

So what is Stacktape? It's a Platform as a Service 2.0 that runs in your own AWS account. It combines the user experience of a PaaS provider (such as Heroku or Render) with the flexibility of a do-it-yourself approach.

If you have any feedback or if there's something missing in Stacktape, I am all ears.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39716249

Points: 13

# Comments: 1

AWS is designed to be very flexible and configurable (example: look at IAM). The tradeof is the complexity and amount of work required to set up even the most frequently used services (such as ECS Fargate or Lambda).

That being said, if somebody is looking for a simple, developer-first experience, and wants to use AWS (and have all of its power/flexibility), have a look at https://stacktape.com (I'm a founder).

The cloud (and by "cloud" I mostly mean AWS) in general is indeed insanely complex. Not only is it complex and hard to use for dedicated and trained DevOps/Cloud experts, it's even more overwhelming for developers wanting to just deploy their simple apps.

This statement is in my opinion almost universaly accepted - during our market research, we've interviewed ~150 DevOps/Cloud experts and ~250 developers that have been using AWS. Only ~2.5% of them have said that the complexity of AWS is not an issue for them.

That being said, I understand that AWS has to be complex by design. Not only it offers ~250 different services, but the flexible/configurable way it's designed simply requires a lot of expertise and configuration. For example, the granularity and capabilities of AWS IAM is unparalelled. But it comes at a cost - the configurational and architectural complexity is just beyond what an average AWS user is willing to accept.

An alternative to the cloud complexity are the PaaS platforms (such as Heroku or Render). But they also have their disadvantages - mostly significantly increased costs, lower flexibility and far less supported use-cases.

At https://stacktape.com, we're developing an abstraction over AWS, that is simple enough so that any developer can use it, yet allows to configure/extend anything you might need for complex applications. Stacktape is like a PaaS platform that deploys applications/infrastructure to your own AWS account.

We believe that Stacktape offers the perfect mix of ease-of-use, productivity, cost-efficiency and flexibility. It can be used to deploy anything from side projects to complex enterprise applications.

I'll be very happy to hear your thoughts or to hear any feedback.