
Backplane is shutting down - zalmoxes
https://www.backplane.io/
======
ksajadi
I've been bitten by service shut downs like this and over the years, here is
the "rulebook" I've made for myself to reduce the risk:

\- Don't use products from startups with unknown, dubious business models that
are clearly subsidised by VC money until they "figure out how to monetize".
(recently I saw a company saying "our business model is still firming up,
whatever that means).

\- Open source doesn't mean it's safe. Very few open source companies have
solid business models and if the vast majority of the contrinbutors to the
project come from the same company, then if they go down or get aquihired
reviving the project and its community is not always guaranteed or simple. OSS
projects need major adoption to be safe from this sort of damage.

\- I sometimes even research the VCs backing the founders as well. I have seen
companies founded by associates in VC firms leaving the firm to start a
company because they know 1. they can get funding from their old pals in the
firm, 2. they are going to be selling the company quickly to X because of some
insider information about X's need or an internal project to find a company to
buy in the space. Some founders are serial "build and flip"ers and I avoid
using their products.

I feel much safer buying crtical services from a bootstrapped and profitable
startup than a well funded one that doesn't have a clear business model.

~~~
germainelong
2\. Open Source is relatively safe when you are able to self-host it. It is
good to setup an environment and test the features on your own machines and
also check how easy is to extract the data.

1-3 is a roulette. Unless they have a technology that you cannot substitute
with an open source solution then it is difficult to justify using it. There
must be a solid extraction plan available so that you can move your data to an
alternative solution in reasonable time. Sometimes it is better to hire a team
and expand existing open source solution with necessary features. Sometimes
this could lead to a side product and another stream of revenue.

~~~
oliwarner
Having source and license to run something, and being willing and able to
self-support the software through (eg) security issues are two very different
prospects.

This is network infrastructure stuff. Not the kind of thing you leave to
fester.

~~~
nine_k
At least, it gives you a much longer runway to migrate off the no-more-
supported solution.

SaaS, if it closes shop, becomes instantly unavailable.

------
goobynight
Wow. If I were a user, I'd hate to have this dropped on me today. Christmas
eve is in 10 days and your traffic is about to stop routing in 15 days.

~~~
VectorLock
Yeah I think in certain circles this is known as a "dick move."

------
nine_k
Cases like this make me always think _very_ hard before admitting a closed-
source / SaaS solution into the critical path of my stack.

In this regard, large established players have the benefit of the doubt when
using a proprietary SaaS service: they are unlikely to fold, and if they
sunset a product, they will likely give ample warning well ahead of time. (But
not always even so: I see any new Google consumer product as a "while supplies
last" sale.)

~~~
jwr
As a SaaS author: I would also suggest taking into account the business model
of the SaaS you are looking at.

The old way of thinking was that a Serious Company is safer than a one- or
two-founder operation. But Serious VC-funded Companies are unprofitable most
of the time and burn through VC money, subsidizing their business. Even if
they don't crash, a "successful outcome" is an acquisition, which most of the
time results in shutting down the product and a post about what a "wonderful
journey" this was. And don't forget all the products that Google just shut
down over the years.

A self-funded slow-growth profitable startup can be a much more stable bet,
even though it seems counter-intuitive.

~~~
bilbo0s
> _A self-funded slow-growth profitable startup can be a much more stable
> bet..._

I think his point is that Microsoft, Amazon, and Google are even safer.

~~~
Signez
I may be mad, but I'm at a point where I would trust a self-funded slow-growth
profitable startup waaaay more than Google to run a service in the long run.

Decades of "quickly started, even more quickly deprecated" services have taken
their toll.

~~~
marcinzm
Sure Google can and does shut down products but they tend to give more than
two weeks notice during the holidays.

------
marcinzm
Two week notice during the holiday season seems pretty sudden and painful for
users. I feel bad for those who now have to scramble and probably miss time
with their families as a result.

~~~
tmikaeld
This seems like an all-in-one solution and quite complex, I highly doubt that
this can be exchanged in a short time or maybe even at all...

I really feel bad for those who committed their company to this company.

~~~
marcinzm
Yeah, definitely not fun for those impacted.

In my eyes it's evidence that you definitely shouldn't bet your company on a
startup unless you have a backup plan that you can implement quickly or the
benefits are massive (ie: the reward is worth potentially losing your
business). Larger companies also kill products but they tend to give a lot
more heads up.

~~~
tmikaeld
The company I work for was heavily invested in Adobe BusinessCatalyst, which
Adobe shut down.

The difference is that Adobe have money, so it's not a two weeks notice, but
two years notice - which is reasonable!

Unfortunately, new customers where still annoyed and chose alternatives.

------
JoshLedgard
At KickoffLabs we used them to handle a bunch of routing on behalf of our
hosted customers.

The timing was less than ideal for sure.

However they arranged a good support system with the folks at Fly.io. We’ve
already transitioned new customers to it and they are helping to migrate
existing sites and certs next week.

I think it’s a risk you just have to take, but we learned a lesson that for
things that are dependancies for your business it’s good to have a couple of
alternatives lined up or working side by side. :)

------
bertjk
I like the basic technical idea behind Backplane, which is that your backend
servers "dial-out" and connect to the edge load balancers. Does anyone know
why this technique is not used more? Or is it actually common but I just
haven't heard of it? If so who/where is it actually done this way?

~~~
ithkuil
(shameless plug) you might find this interesting: [https://github.com/bitnami-
labs/udig](https://github.com/bitnami-labs/udig)

It focuses on Zero configuration by skipping the account creation and hostname
selection (and long term state) by using the hash of the tunnel destination
public key as hostname.

------
rostasteve
2 year old seed round company with <10 employees. I don't imagine they have a
whole lot of customers, and hopefully no customers that rely solely on them.

------
kodablah
I understand not wanting to appear on "our incredible journey" blog or
whatever with a bunch of sap, but surely more information can be made public
without everyone emailing? Why shutting down? Why only a couple of weeks? Will
the code be open sourced?

~~~
mrkurt
Customers got emails a few days before this, and they're getting a lot of
help. It's easy to criticize but I think they're handling it pretty well.

~~~
ineedasername
"A few days before this" really isn't "handling this pretty well".

It's great that they (you?) are offering some assistance in transitioning to
an alternative, but it's still a very crappy situation for customers during
the holiday season with many people taking extra time off.

~~~
lallysingh
Considering the fact that they're going out of business, I wonder how many
customers that is? Still a shitty time of year to do it, and a horribly small
time window.

------
williamstein
What is Backplane? Why is it shutting down?

~~~
all2
> Backplane is a service that unifies discovery, routing, and load balancing
> for web servers written in any language, running in any cloud or datacenter.
> Traffic shaping, request enrichment, blue/green deploys, and other difficult
> to implement networking operations become trivial when using Backplane's
> combination of hosted and on-premise software.

From their docs page here:
[https://www.backplane.io/docs](https://www.backplane.io/docs)

~~~
gobengo
In the last ten years I have also seen 'backplane' be:

* A protocol for helping web widgets on a page communicate and share data [https://openid.net/wg/bp/](https://openid.net/wg/bp/) . We used to support it at Livefyre to interop with certain Janrain products, but the ecosystem wasn't so big at the time. It wasn't under OpenID at the time.

* This roller coaster of a social network startup [https://techcrunch.com/2015/03/06/the-backplane-black-box/](https://techcrunch.com/2015/03/06/the-backplane-black-box/)

~~~
pizza
I remember being at a hackathon of theirs (the Lady Gaga backplane) years back
and seeing dozens of what looked like Herman-Miller Aeron chairs all over the
office. Maybe they got them for cheap, maybe they weren't actually Aerons, but
also maybe this pretty small (I don't actually know how many employees they
had..) startup had a couple tens of thousands of dollars worth of office
chairs

~~~
driverdan
The cost of a good chair is nothing compared to other expenses like salaries.
Aerons aren't my favorite chair but I sure as hell don't want to work for a
company that makes me sit in a terrible $50 Office Depot chair.

Besides, you can get Aerons for much cheaper than retail if you look.

~~~
xnyan
Even if you give zero shits about your employees, the $50 office max is going
to fall apart fast with daily use. HM sells somewhat stripped-down cheaper
versions of certain models specifically for the bulk office drone employee
market and in bulk the pricing is competitive with other makers.

------
0898
Not to be confused with Backblaze, in case anybody else made that mistake.

------
closeparen
“Backplane” refers to the rear interior surface of an equipment cabinet, where
there’s often a maze of electrical conductors for routing power/data around
the various rack units or cards it can hold. Examples include blade servers,
very serious routers, and theatrical lighting dimmer racks.

The system can be expanded and serviced (without interruption) by installing
and removing modules, but the backplane is forever.

A hot SaaS startup purporting to be your backplane is about as backwards as it
gets. Smart companies are using cloud services in exactly the opposite way: as
temporary, interchangeable capacity slotted into a backplane _they_ own.

~~~
jiveturkey
> rear interior surface of an equipment cabinet.

it refers to a component interconnect backplane, an electrical / signal bus.
not the rear interior surface of a cabinet.

------
sotojuan
They couldn't wait till after new years to do this?

~~~
bdibs
They're probably doing it now for tax reasons.

------
mooreds
If, like me, you asked "what is backplane?" Here you go:
[https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/backplane](https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/backplane)

------
v1k0d3n
so i'm curious then...

considering that this is displayed on the CNCF interactive landscape page,
does it mean that backplane will be quickly removed from the service proxy
group, or does anyone think that CNCF is already aware? i reaalize it's not
backed project or anything, but it clearly made it there somehow. considering
how hot CNCF is right now, made even more apparent by the 8K+ sized crowd this
week, i would imagine that the CNCF website brings a nice bit of traffic to
these small companies.

it's too bad...backplane's vision seemed promising albeit lofty, and against
some heavy odds (with some big players in the space).

~~~
dankohn1
Thanks for the mention. I updated
[https://landscape.cncf.io/format=landscape](https://landscape.cncf.io/format=landscape)
to remove them.

If I miss the initial announcement, we would remove them when they don't tweet
for 3 months: [https://github.com/cncf/landscape#non-updated-
items](https://github.com/cncf/landscape#non-updated-items)

(Disclosure: I maintain the landscape.)

------
maybeiambatman
Is this the same company that at one point was making social networks for
celebrities?

[https://techcrunch.com/2013/02/03/backplane/](https://techcrunch.com/2013/02/03/backplane/)

~~~
HEHENE
No, different people entirely.

[https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/backplane](https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/backplane)

[https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/backplane-
io](https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/backplane-io)

------
zalmoxes
I'm neither an employee nor a customer, just someone who was following the
project on twitter because it looked very intriguing. I just want to say that
the comments on this thread are absolutely ridiculous and I expected better.
Does anyone actually think the customers would find out at the last minute?
That the company would leave its users without any support? It's baseless
speculation and my guess is it's totally wrong. \- The company is founded by
Blake Mizerany
[https://twitter.com/bmizerany?lang=en](https://twitter.com/bmizerany?lang=en)
an engineer known for Sinatra and a bunch of other well respected projects. \-
The users adopting an early stage startup's product are likely friends/former
colleagues who are putting personal trust into the team. Does anyone really
think nobody got a heads up, or possible support deals while they migrate?

Second, Backplane really looked like great tech
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=43wFJBRTHG0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=43wFJBRTHG0)

~~~
irl_zebra
The customers did find out at the last minute. Weeks notice is last minute.

~~~
dragonwriter
> Weeks notice is last minute.

Well, no, it's literally not. It's actually a reasonably long lead time for
“going out of business”, which basically no one ever announces before
essentially all hope of finding a way to keep the business running is
exhausted, which intrinsically means there is little runway left.

~~~
gamblor956
Yep, it literally is last minute for a platform product used by others during
a time of the year when the developers responsible for finding/building a
replacement would otherwise have gone on vacation.

If this were a tangible product, a week notice would be fine since it gives
customers time to stock up.

