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porter-dev
porter
HISTORICAL RECORD2021–2024
porter-dev / porter · Not publicly available

porter

Discover this repository through its Hacker News conversations.

8Distinct people
12Mentions
0Explicit recommenders
REPOSITORY AT A GLANCE

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This week on Hacker News

Nov 7–Nov 14 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/14/2026, 1:49:46 PM UTC.

No direct repository links were found in the indexed HN discussions over the past seven days. Older discussions are available below.

Mentions over time

HN mentions by year12 dated mentions

Observed mentions: 2021-02-21 21:08:41 UTC to 2024-04-29 18:49:49 UTC.

0123452021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 5 mentions; 4 submissions, 1 comments20212022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 4 mentions; 0 submissions, 4 comments20222023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 comments2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 2 mentions; 0 submissions, 2 comments2024

Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.

View mention counts and date ranges
UTC ranges include their start and exclude their end. Select a period to filter the source evidence.
PeriodStart (UTC)End (exclusive, UTC)MentionsSubmissionsComments
20212021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC541
20222022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC404
20232023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC101
20242024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC202

What Hacker News says

12 sources
Yep, we're backed by YC in the W24 batch - this is evident on our landing page [1]. We're both second time CTOs and we've been on both sides of this, as consumers of and creators of OSS. I was previously a co-founder and CTO of Porter [2], which had an open-core model. There are two risks that most companies think about in the open core model: 1. Big companies using your platform without contributing back in some way or buying a license. I think this is less of a risk, because these organizations are incentivized to buy a support license to help with maintenance, upgrades, and since we sit on a critical path, with uptime. 2. Hyperscalers folding your product in to their offering [3]. This is a bigger risk but is also a bit of a "champagne problem". Note that smaller companies/individual developers are who we'd like to enable, not crowd ou
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t. If people would like to use our cloud offering because it reduces the headache for them, they should do so. If they just want to run our service and manage their own PostgreSQL, they should have the option to do that too. Based on all of this, here's where we land on things: 1. Everything we've built so far has been 100% MIT licensed. We'd like to keep it that way and make money off of Hatchet Cloud. We'll likely roll out a separate enterprise support agreement for self hosting. 2. Our cloud version isn't going to run a different core engine or API server than our open source version. We'll write interfaces for all plugins to our servers and engines, so even if we have something super specific to how we've chosen to do things on the cloud version, we'll expose the options to write your own plugins on the engine and server. 3. We'd like to make self-hosting as easy to use as our cloud version. We don't want our self-hosted offering to be a second-class citizen. Would love to hear everyone's thoughts on this. [1] https://hatchet.run [2] https://github.com/porter-dev/porter [3] https://www.elastic.co/blog/why-license-change-aws
In Show HN: Hatchet – Open-source distributed task queue
> it does seem like your target market are dev teams which are light on DevOps skillsets because you can run these systems for free with a modicum of DevOps chops on the team. Managing infrastructure at scale is not trivial (otherwise, why would full-time devops engineers exist?), and that's why platforms like Porter exists to help companies scale more easily with fewer devops resources. It's the same reasoning as why so many developers like yourself use Fly.io - you could run your applications for free on an EC2 instance instead of paying fly.io/heroku/render a margin on top of it if you have a modicum of devops chops. Yet clearly, these platforms are bringing enough value in the axes of developer experience and reliability that justifies the additional cost for you. RE your comment in the other thread about there being open source optio
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ns: it's worth mentioning that Porter is also open-source (repo here: https://github.com/porter-dev/porter). If you want to use Porter purely as a UI on top of your own infrastructure that you are managing yourself, you are more than welcome to take it out on a spin with our OSS repository!
In Migrating from Heroku to EKS
Porter (YC S20) | Full Time | Full-Stack Engineer | NYC or Remote | https://porter.run Hey HN, I'm Alexander, co-founder of Porter. We're building Heroku in your own cloud - we let users link up their own AWS/GCP, point to the code they want to run, and then put the rest of the hosting process on autopilot (CI/CD, SSL, autoscaling, zero downtime deploys, infra monitoring, etc). We're hiring NYC-based or remote engineers that are passionate about building tools for developers. As we're a fast-growing seed-stage startup, you should be comfortable with regularly shifting priorities and iterating at a very high (daily) velocity. Tech stack: Go, Typescript, React, Kubernetes, AWS If you'd like to take a look at our codebase, we're open source - check it out at https://github.com/porter-dev/porter. Open positions: - Kubernetes Engineer: https:/
Read the rest
/www.workatastartup.com/jobs/45970 - Full-stack Engineer: https://www.workatastartup.com/jobs/43716 Please apply by sending an email to jobs [at] porter [dot] run or applying through https://www.workatastartup.com/jobs/43716.
In Ask HN: Who is hiring? (November 2022)
Porter (YC S20) | Full Time | Full-Stack Engineer | NYC or Remote | https://porter.run Hey HN, I'm Alexander, co-founder of Porter. We're building Heroku in your own cloud - we let users link up their own AWS/GCP, point to the code they want to run, and then put the rest of the hosting process on autopilot (CI/CD, SSL, autoscaling, zero downtime deploys, infra monitoring, etc). We're hiring NYC-based or remote engineers that are passionate about building tools for developers. As we're a fast-growing seed-stage startup, you should be comfortable with regularly shifting priorities and iterating at a very high (daily) velocity. Tech stack: Go, Typescript, React, Kubernetes, AWS If you'd like to take a look at our codebase, we're open source - check it out at https://github.com/porter-dev/porter. Open positions: - Kubernetes Engineer: https:/
Read the rest
/www.workatastartup.com/jobs/45970 - Full-stack Engineer: https://www.workatastartup.com/jobs/43716 Please apply by sending an email to jobs [at] porter [dot] run or applying through https://www.workatastartup.com/jobs/43716.
In Ask HN: Who is hiring? (October 2022)
Porter (YC S20) | Full Time | Full-Stack Engineer | NYC or Remote | https://porter.run Hey HN, I'm Alexander, co-founder of Porter. We're building Heroku in your own cloud. We let users link up their own AWS/GCP, point to the code they want to run, and then put the rest of the hosting process on autopilot (CI/CD, SSL, autoscaling, zero downtime deploys, infra monitoring, etc). We're hiring NYC-based or remote engineers that are passionate about building tools for developers. As we're a fast-growing seed-stage startup, you should be comfortable with regularly shifting priorities and iterating at a very high (daily) velocity. Tech stack: Go, Typescript, React, Kubernetes, AWS If you'd like to take a look at our codebase, we're open source - check it out at https://github.com/porter-dev/porter. Open positions: - Kubernetes Engineer: https://
Read the rest
www.workatastartup.com/jobs/45970 - Full-stack Engineer: https://www.workatastartup.com/jobs/43716 Please apply by sending an email to jobs [at] porter [dot] run or applying through https://www.workatastartup.com/jobs/43716.
In Ask HN: Who is hiring? (September 2022)

Launch HN: Porter (YC S20) – Open-source Heroku in your own cloud

Hi HN! We are Alexander, Justin, and Trevor from Porter. We're building a Kubernetes-based Platform as a Service (PaaS) that deploys applications on your own cloud provider. Specifically, Porter provisions a Kubernetes cluster in your own cloud account and lets you deploy and manage applications on it through a Heroku-like PaaS layer. And although applications deployed via Porter run on Kubernetes, no knowledge of Kubernetes is necessary to use Porter. Here is our repository (https://github.com/porter-dev/porter) and website (https://getporter.dev). There was also an HN thread about us a few weeks ago, posted by someone who discovered us (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26587637 - thank you OP!). We have known each other since high school/college and have been working on projects together full-time since 2020. When YC funded us in S2
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0, we were building a remote development platform for teams on Kubernetes (kinda like repl.it but for microservices in particular). This was a more enterprisey product and we got burnt out by the slow sales/iteration cycle (we had zero experience with sales, let alone enterprises). So we decided to pivot a few months after demo day. When we were struggling to get traction with the original direction, we learned a ton by talking to engineering teams that are using Kubernetes (k8s). One thing we noticed is that there's an increasing number of startups who start on a PaaS like Heroku and end up migrating to k8s later as their applications “grow out” of Heroku, due to constraints in networking, performance, security, etc. While Kubernetes is great, it incurs a ton of engineering overhead. For teams who don’t know k8s at all, learning everything from scratch is daunting and time-consuming. Even if there are devops engineers on the team who are familiar with kubernetes, adopting k8s slows down developer velocity because other developers always need the devops engineers’ help to troubleshoot the slightest application issues. While we were working on our previous product, we discovered that some companies even built internal development platforms (IdP) that are much like Porter, in order to help developers deploy and troubleshoot their applications without help from the devops engineers. Our goal with Porter is to create a platform that is truly as easy to use as Heroku, without compromising the flexibility of k8s. There are many self-hosted PaaS's that came before Porter, such as Flynn, Tsuru, Dokku, and CapRover, which were all created before Kubernetes changed the DevOps landscape. While these are great lightweight options for smaller projects, a PaaS built on top of the k8s ecosystem comes with many benefits such as scalability, stability, configurability and interoperability across cloud providers. We believe that k8s is the best system to deliver a PaaS on, and we’re not alone - many of the new hosted PaaS’s are also built on top of k8s, although that’s an implementation detail that is usually not advertised to the user. We want to not only deliver the PaaS experience on top of Kubernetes, but also give users full ownership/control of the underlying k8s cluster by running it in their own cloud. How it works: we spin up a k8s cluster in your own AWS/GCP/DO account and let you deploy and manage applications on it through a Heroku-like abstraction layer. For teams using a PaaS like Heroku, Porter can be a drop-in replacement that you don’t “grow out” of. And although our abstraction layer covers most use cases, we let those who want to customize go freely under the hood to interact with the underlying cluster. In each cloud provider, we provision the standard managed k8s offering (e.g. EKS/GKE/DigitalOcean Kubernetes), so the clusters we provision are perfectly compatible with kubectl and any other k8s tooling out there. It’s even possible to connect Porter to an existing k8s cluster—this isn’t the primary use case we’re building for at the moment, but we’d love to discuss it in the comments if anyone is interested. In terms of implementation, we’ve built Porter around the Helm ecosystem, and every application you deploy is packaged as a Helm chart. For those who want more visibility, we’ve built features like “devops mode” that lets you visualize and manage the Helm charts and its underlying k8s objects. We’ve published Porter to be fully open source under the MIT license. We provide a hosted version that is currently in open beta, but it's also possible to run Porter locally. It’s worth clarifying that on the hosted version, the applications you deploy through Porter still run in your own cloud. What is hosted by us is only the PaaS layer, not your applications. We plan to release a self-hostable version of the PaaS layer itself in the near future, packaged as a Helm chart. We do not support this yet because self-hosting the PaaS layer inevitably incurs devops overhead and requires some knowledge of k8s, and we are currently focused on those who just want the Heroku experience without having to deal with k8s in any way. In terms of pricing, we are still figuring out the specifics. Our goal is to not charge individual developers/small startups but instead draw revenue from larger teams based on usage, and with premium features that are geared towards collaboration. Existing PaaS’s like Heroku/Netlify have solid examples of such premium features - review apps, pipelines, and Role Based Access Control are a few examples that we also consider to be potential premium features on Porter. That said, we are currently focused on laying out the stable foundation of the platform, so these premium features are further down on our roadmap. Thank you so much for reading and we'd love it if you could give it a try: https://github.com/porter-dev/porter. We'll be hanging out in the comments to hear any ideas and feedback you may have. If you have any experiences related to what we’ve built, we would love it if you could share them below. Very much looking forward to learning from you!
239 points · Open discussion
Hi everyone, I'm one of the maintainers of Porter (https://github.com/porter-dev/porter). We are building a Kubernetes-powered PaaS that runs in your own cloud. We consider Porter to be the next-gen successor to Flynn in the era of k8s. We had the pleasure of getting on a call with the Flynn founders last week and learned so much from their experience. It was incredible to hear the first-hand account of the past 7 years building Flynn (seriously, what a ride). We took their lessons and advice to heart and hope to fill the void Flynn is leaving behind. To the founders of Flynn and all contributors, thanks so much for building such an awesome project and paving the way. Porter is still in its early stage, and we're super excited to start sharing our progress with the community. Exciting stuff coming your way soon - stay tuned!
In RIP Flynn.io

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