looks like an answer to Cloudflare Workers
Cloudflare workers wasn’t always an 1:1 option for simple hosting (iirc) and people used to think it was more complicated than vercel etc but it has changed in recent years and right now they have made things smoother and simpler to compete with vercel and others.
Now that AWS has entered into the field as well, given that vercel and others already build on top of AWS. It will be interesting to see how this all goes.
I wonder if more og hyper scalers like say hetzner/ovh and others will also target this audience
Render also doesn't require pay for play.
This is something that big hyperscallers are yet to understand, free to play and then one is hooked, it is much easier to go to the next step.
"Hosting a hobby project for free without credit card is tough (rant) & here's how I did it (Hugging face)"[0]
I remember trying to evaluate all the options and trying to find a good enough option and there were very few options aside from Vercel and Render or rewriting your application to fit cloudflare workers.
HF spaces is a good option that I had found back then. Also, I recommend having a separate backend service like supabase with HF as if your server is inactive for 24-48 hours, the storage could get wiped out so backend should be seperated.
One of the biggest things that I am proud of was how I broke the nat of intel tiber jupyter using applying a custom patch of bearssh and before it, using junest and ssh and ppng.io, all because I wanted to play minecraft with my friend without credit card :-D
Nowadays, I have a few cheap vps's which makes things so much simpler but I remember that struggle and vercel/render used to help in most cases thus they are so popular.
So I seriously agree with what you are saying based on my experience as well. Though I have to wonder?: I think that the reason that small companies aren't attempting this is because of reasons of scam/spam, but what reasons are there for AWS and others to not do so.
What are the reasons that you think that they don't already provide such service, or do you feel as if this is the natural continuation of it and soon we are gonna see AWS or large hypercloud provider providing free very small compute similar to vercel/render?
Also thanks for making me remember again the blog that I had written :-D
[0]: https://smileplease.mataroa.blog/blog/hosting-a-hobby-projec...
Whereas Vercel, Render and co, got to offer such accounts for free due to VC money and trying to get people on board, while fighting against the big names for customer eyes.
I remember reading about vercel trying to move away from AWS or railway successfully doing so. Their long term end goal still is to migrate away from AWS to capture more juicy margins (or is it? Vsauce music plays)
So with that in mind, has AWS and others realized that providing free credits would be more disruption to actual people paying right now and more loss than whatever Vercel is fighting for?
And if that's the case, then to the investors funding Vercel... Do they know that as well?
Also, I think Vercel has gotten to the point where they are handling spam good-ish but the other alternative railway (not entirely free without credit card yes but still an alternative) still relied on GCP (yes even after their migration/colocation) and GCP's opaque black structures shut down all of railways because of a few accounts doing something malicious.
That is the cost of doing business on someone's else computers and also suppose somebody is creating a new vercel competitor, then they are intentionally targeting themselves as a free alternative and are gonna get free users who intentionally might not pay while facing spam/scam/reputation issues and would need constant maintanence and support. (For example: a guy X creates a scam site targeting Y company at this new Z vercel alternative, the Y company has to contact Z and Z will contact it back and Z has to fix the issues X caused, and there are many more X than what Z can handle)
I am more-so interested though that if Vercel is really a great idea (lure free users etc.) then why aren't others trying the same now and flooding free compute. Is it that the investors who wish to invest in such companies would have better returns in investing in Vercel anyway and have better chances in beating the traditional hyperscalers over establishing a new competitor over Vercel and then over AWS etc.?
If we were to try to arrive at an conclusion or for me to try to learn something new, what could it be?:
Is it that AWS/GCP/Azure are intentionally not becoming a Vercel alternative because they can get away by doing so and its more profitable for them to do so?, and that it's not profitable or even possible for others to do so as well unless they have deep pockets to burn through.
I believe Cloudflare is the only FaaS that offers that. It makes it fantastic for putting a light weight layer in front of a few upstream API, like say inference providers.
Wasmer also offers the same (charging only for active CPU usage), with the advantage that you can run full Node.js and Python workloads
And the maximum worker time is based on processing time, not wall time.
Both allow deployment of web apps without an adapter layer. Both scale to zero (really useful for hobby apps; small internal apps that do not get sustained traffic, but can get bursty). Both allow concurrency control.
Cloud Run "family" is quite a nice way of managing serverless ("orchestrationless"?) containers. Cloud Run worker pools for background workers that connect to Pub/Sub. Cloud Run jobs for long running tasks like extracts, ETL. Cloud Run instances (newer offering) for always on agents.
Exciting times, I can’t wait for Cloudflares response.
what will be interesting to see is startup times.
V8 isolates seem "worse" on their face (e.g. mostly incompatible with non-JS apps, more difficult to secure), while aiming down-market. The hyperscalers' biggest existing customers aren't asking for them; they are asking for more and better micro VMs to run their existing codebases. It's only the little guys looking to deploy greenfield apps with low ops overhead and on a tight budget that really appreciate the Workers model, and to AWS these seem like small potatoes. Meanwhile there's a huge amount of investment needed to build out this entirely new and different way of doing things (we've been working on it almost a decade now!). In the worst case, this investment is wasted, and in the best case, cannibalizes the existing product line.
There likely many people at AWS who recognize the dilemma, but still cannot push the organization in the right direction. Too much inertia, too many stakeholders who don't get it, because it's unintuitive. When orgs get big they just cannot take disruptive steps, even when they were built on disruption in the past. They only finally come around after the new disruptor is eating their lunch, but by then it's too late.