Show HN: I'm building a catalog of cloud architecture | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: I'm building a catalog of cloud architecture

getrevolv.com

99 pointsjeremylevy40 comments

Is there a sample or example with comments somewhere that does not require a login with GitHub? It's alright for usage but for a Show HN I imagine a login could be skipped. I honestly got very curious about it but closed the page before sharing my personal data without knowing more.

EDIT: I managed to find some screenshots here after taking a look at the author's Twitter feed... https://medium.com/revolv2/deploying-a-laravel-7-application...

I'm so sorry about that! We've written some blog posts:

https://medium.com/revolv2/im-building-revolv-to-automate-cl...

https://medium.com/revolv2

Hope that helps!

I was hoping to see a full example of how to use your platform, and followed the first example link to what seemed to be a detailed tutorial for how to deploy a web app, with the title "Deploying a Symfony 4/5 Application on AWS Fargate (part 1)".

That page[1] is asking me to create a Medium account to read it. I closed the tab without reading further, and would highly recommend you find a place to host your docs that doesn't require creating an account.

[1]: https://medium.com/revolv2/creating-and-deploying-a-symfony-...

Sorry!

We have started on Medium for the audience but we'll move on your own domain.

The "friend" links:

https://medium.com/revolv2/creating-and-deploying-a-symfony-...

https://medium.com/revolv2/deploying-a-symfony-4-5-applicati...

https://medium.com/revolv2/deploying-a-laravel-7-application...

Your product puts an emphasis on user friendliness. If your target user has not deployed to cloud before, you’ll need to show clearly just how much easier/clearer/more manageable/$improvement having Revolv is.

For prospective users who have cloud experience, they have already developed workarounds and/or gripes with tooling and management. Consider adding quotes from your user research to illustrate the benefits ( plus what you already mentioned as in the pipeline).

How fast can you digest the blog content into the current product copy? Having the info easily available will be better for conversion.

Lastly most companies prefer to known their expenditures ahead of time, and respond strongly to less uncertainty. You’ll get more traction with a pricing scheme that is independent of the variable $ cloud charges.

Wow! Thanks you very much for this insightful comment. It's very interesting.

Honestly, I've created Revolv for my own needs, as a "full-stack" developer.

I've often found myself wanting something like this: "A Terraform with Heroku-like features".

We've planned to target users that have low to medium cloud experience, so we need to show clearly how cloud architecture creation is easier by using Revolv.

The pricing is something we've been thinking about for a while. Currently, I don't have enough data to make a decision.

It's very difficult because it's not something that have been done yet.

> "A Terraform with Heroku-like features".

I think, AWS Amplify (Firebase, I guess, in GCP's case?) gets a low/medium cloud experience engineer almost all the way there, and they're continually improving their offering by integrating with multiple AWS services but there's too much magic and if there's a need to customize anything whatsoever, or if anything breaks, then it quickly becomes a nightmare to deal with, but that's a feature not a bug due to prevalence of the aforementioned "magic". I guess, currently, their support for other AWS services isn't broad enough and mostly geared towards Mobile and Web, so may be they're not squarely competing with your offering, yet.

Emphasis mine:

> I'm building a catalog of cloud architecture

What I expected as a user was to see a ton of examples - a catalog - of different cloud-native architectures. What I got on the homepage was a couple logos, a GitHub login, and a footer where the "Careers" link goes to a Intercom modal.

All that is fine, but when I reluctantly give this anonymous app my email address in order to log in, I'm met with the following architectures:

1. Docker for HTTP, if it's on AWS (which none of my stuff is)

And nothing else, other than an option to Create My Own, which... opens Intercom.

It's possible that this is an amazing product, and I'm honestly pretty predisposed to like this kind of thing. Architecture is my day job and I like fiddling with cloud stuff in my free time, so this is definitely the kind of thing I would play around with, and maybe even pay a little bit each month to do some cool things. Unfortunately the promise (which I may have misinterpreted!) and the delivery are pretty far apart.

I'd love to see diagrams of different architectures, explanations of what the individual pieces do, with "Build on $PLATFORM" buttons underneath it, maybe with discussions about the differences between a given architecture on AWS compared to Azure, etc. There's a lot of really neat things you could do with this type of project, especially if you can look at anonymized architectures others have written.

I like the idea but 20% of cloud spend in perpetuity is completely ridiculous and rules out anything above personal toy projects

Even if someone did sign up for the paid tier, they are strongly incentivized to cancel and keep to code

I think the idea is very cool, but similar to the parent comment I have a lot of reservations about how the economics of this work:

1. I get that it seems like pretty much any software business isn't feasible if it doesn't involve a subscription model, but this seems like the last thing I'd be willing to pay a subscription for. I'd pay for what is essentially a good template, but after that, I'd want to own it.

2. In one of the Medium posts the author posted he mentioned that architectures can be 'ejected'. How does that work with your pricing model?

I guess a pricing model where you paid a subscription fee for additional services (some sort of monitoring, automatic upgrades, etc.), but with the option to pay a flat fee at any time to 'eject', is something I'd consider.

But yeah, 20% of cloud spend in perpetuity is steep. More importantly, I put anything that is a perpetual spend under an extremely critical lens, especially something expected to grow linearly with revenue.

Thanks!

Pricing is something that we've thinking about for a while.

What's your opinion? How much are you willing to pay?

It's a first alpha release. We're listening to feedback. Billing is not implemented yet.

Pricing is something that we've thinking about for a while.

What's your opinion? How much are you willing to pay?

Sounds interesting. Can you create a video showing how it works with a couple different examples?

Yes! It's in the pipeline :)!

In the meantime, you could read our introductory blog post:

https://medium.com/revolv2/im-building-revolv-to-automate-cl...

Hope that helps!

Hey Jeremy, congrats on the launch! Neat product, wish you luck. In the article, I did find a couple of minor errors you might want to look into. Not meant to nitpick, just a human version of spell-check :)

"Do this startup will be alive 6 months from now?" can be "Will this startup be alive 6 months from now?" and

"Do my architecture will remain usable if I want to stop using Revolv?" can be "Will my architecture remain usable if I want to stop using Revolv?" Good luck.

Good catch! Thanks you very much, I'll fix that!

Reminds me of env0 [1]. Pretty cool idea overall.

[1] https://www.env0.com/

While i like the idea, i don't think you have a real target.

Who would consider your service?

A Frontenddeveloper will not use it because they can't.

Who only has a basic idea on how to host an sympfony application and also is willing to pay 20% commission? A simple architecture costs quickly over 200 $ per Month and then there is no backup or recovery scenario included. A high risk.

Author here. More than happy to answer any questions you may have!

I'm so sorry that you need to authorize access to your email to check it out, you could read our blog post instead:

https://medium.com/revolv2/im-building-revolv-to-automate-cl...

https://medium.com/revolv2

It's a first alpha release. I will make sure that we will do better in the future.

"How to price?" is something we’ve been thinking about for a while.

There are many possibilities:

- Taking a fee as a percentage of your cloud provider bill for each architecture

- A free plan for the architectures created without the user-friendly features and a premium one?

- A monthly subscription? Per developer? Per architecture?

What do you think?

Suggestion: with costs of cloud providers being a problem these days and hard to track, any automation tool like Revolv could ended up being blamed for a huge bill and it's not fair with the tool so maybe in the "Review my architecture" screen you could calculate the monthly total costs and present it to the user beforehand, like "this automation flow may cost around X per month".

Yes, it's something we've planned to add in the second release!

For a later release consider suggesting tweaks that may lower cost without impacting architecture end game.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rent-seeking

Why do I need to got authorize this? I can't tell if this interests me or not. BTW we have a few here you can use if it's Terraform based https://github.com/futurice/terraform-examples

I'm so sorry about that!

It's a first release, so some features are missing.

I've written a blog post that explain in details what Revolv is and why we've build that:

https://medium.com/revolv2/im-building-revolv-to-automate-cl...

Hope that helps!

oh cool, thats helpful. But is it terraform based? What is spat out when ejected?

Yes, it's based on Terraform.

Your GitHub repo looks super useful! Thanks! Thanks! Thanks!

At the time of writing, when you "eject" an architecture, we remove all the "user-friendly" features that we've added.

So you have a fully-working architecture in your own cloud provider account. Like the one you could have been created using Terraform.

We've thought of adding an "export" feature to export all the Terraform/Ansible/Packer... files.

For 20% of the cloud spend as the price , would expect a far more detailed view of what features to expect from the subscription. While it is a interesting concept , not sure if the features would entice anyone to part with 20% of the clod spend for what can be setup initially.

I really like the idea of this but having the pricing based off of cloud spend makes me nervous. Stuff that is launched should be in the most cost efficient way possible but if the fee is based off cloud spend there is an agent principle problem around that.

Feels like an odd pricing model to me but I'm not the target audience so not sure what would be expected. I don't want my cost to Revolv to be so unpredictable. If my AWS costs go up Revolv just keeps charging me more?

Thanks!

We'll add more details.

The price part is something we’ve been thinking about for a while.

There are many possibilities:

- Taking a fee as a percentage of your cloud provider bill for each architecture

- A free plan for the architectures created without the user-friendly features and a premium one?

- A monthly subscription? Per developer? Per architecture?

What do you think?

Check out GruntCode (I think that’s the name) They do devops as a service. ~$8k a year to access their code, they’ll even help you tune it. Never used them.

Looks neat, but it took a lot of skipping around to figure out exactly what it does. Some short front-page blurb that says "Like a form wizard driven terraform" or similar would help.

Thanks!

What do you think of: "Like Terraform but with the user-friendliness of Heroku" ?

Looks super cool! It would be nice to be able to deploy a starter application alongside the architecture as a demo for good practices.

Thanks!

We've created an application that you could use to test the architecture: https://github.com/getrevolv/revolv-docker-architecture-test

We also have written many blog posts that explain how to deploy the most famous frameworks:

https://medium.com/revolv2

Am I out of touch or is 20% of cloud bill outrageous? It would be astronomical for enterprises and not worth it for start-ups.

Hey :)!

It's a first alpha release. We're listening to feedback. Billing is not implemented yet.

Pricing is something that we've thinking about for a while.

We also have written a blog post about that: https://medium.com/revolv2/im-building-revolv-to-automate-cl...

What's your opinion? How much are you willing to pay?

Front page Cloud logos that are circular look like buttons to get more information. Expected to see a copy page about how the product works with a given cloud and was really surprised that they didn’t do anything on click.

I like the idea, but could not find what you do exactly from your features page. Examples would be great. Also, the term user friendly is used a lot without any instances or client testimonials.

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