I wish you luck on your journey with this. We were in the similar space as a YC S20 company - trying to create a Heroku-like experience on AWS. There's been plenty other attempts as well.[1]
After working in this space for a couple years, I realized that unfortunately the market just doesn't exist. Small enough teams will typically hack their way through building an MVP and early versions. They don't need/want the complexity of kubernetes/terraform, most literally run their MVP on a couple of instances. On the other side, once you get big enough, you hire dedicated people to start solving these problems. The middle market in between the two is very small and you most likely will be beat by the services already built into AWS such as Amplify.
I think the issue is cost. Heroku, which is itself on top
Of AWS, is expensive exactly because it has to charge a significant premium over AWS to work (although it is still overpriced). That’s where Render.com and Fly will succeed, by running on their own hardware they can save significantly over running on AWS. I don’t think it’s possible to build a PAAS on top of AWS, the OP with the I/PAAC would though as they aren’t trying to add a business service layer.
I'm just now starting to realize the mistake I've made when coming up with the "Heroku-like experience" headline.
I meant it's similarly easy, not that it's PaaS.
Stacktape is a cloud development framework. It runs on the developer's machine (or on a CI/CD server). It's similar to Serverless framework, except it supports way more resources (containers, SQL databases, MongoDb Atlas clusters, Redis, Kafka, etc). And it also has some additional useful features on top.
> once you get big enough, you hire dedicated people
Stacktape is for these teams. Thanks to Stacktape, they can delay the hire by a year or 2. And they also need to hire fewer of them.
I think "heroku-like" is a good generative metaphor. As for the market existing or not I think there are way more variables at play than that previous comment seems to account for and there's so much room in the cloud solutions market as it continues to grow. Also I could always see an exit where Amazon see's traction and acquires Stacktape to compliment it's existing solutions and fend off other "no dev-ops" solutions.
Agreed with these points. As someone who was using Serverless, and then moved onto using the CDK prolifically, I found that I could ship a single CDK setup via a shared package as easy as we could sharing Serverless config files. But at the end of the day, CloudFormation is a royal PITA and the weakness of both wrappers.
As an aside, I do like how Terraform manages things, but have never enjoyed their configuration language. CDK for Terraform is something I'm watching closely.
Also, stuff like Google Cloud Run and App Engine is pretty damn easy to use. I hate DevOps and neither of those products give me headaches. Same with spinning up Postgres on GCP, it's a few clicks.
I absolutely agree with you as well as disagree with you. There is market, few older players like platform.sh has been serving them. If you analyse their customer base, it is mostly agencies. The market is very very small, super saturated and competitive.
After working in this space for a couple years, I realized that unfortunately the market just doesn't exist. Small enough teams will typically hack their way through building an MVP and early versions. They don't need/want the complexity of kubernetes/terraform, most literally run their MVP on a couple of instances. On the other side, once you get big enough, you hire dedicated people to start solving these problems. The middle market in between the two is very small and you most likely will be beat by the services already built into AWS such as Amplify.
[1] https://github.com/debarshibasak/awesome-paas