
Universal Now: Now, on Every Cloud - sorenbs
https://zeit.co/blog/universal-now
======
thangngoc89
I must say that this sounds exactly like TJ's Up blueprints [1]. TJ've been
working on Apex Up for over a month [2].

[1]: [https://medium.com/@tjholowaychuk/blueprints-for-
up-1-5f8197...](https://medium.com/@tjholowaychuk/blueprints-for-
up-1-5f8197179275) [2]:
[https://github.com/apex/up](https://github.com/apex/up)

~~~
_Marak_
Really not surprised to see rauchg (Guillermo Rauch) steal more ideas for his
startup from colleagues.

The entire premise of Zeit is something that I explained to him five years ago
in a taxi ride. I was in active communication with Guillermo about developing
the idea up until two years ago when he went silent for a month or two and I
then I read the announcement for Zeit on Hacker News.

I'm sure he'll sell Zeit to the first high-bidder and completely throw the
development team under the bus ( like he did to TJ at his last startup ).

If you don't believe me, you can just look at the Github activity for the Zeit
organization. Guillermo has copy and pastied the same Now project into new
projects several times ( which deletes the commit logs of several contributors
giving him sole Git credit for the projects ).

~~~
nodesocket
I'm not going to get involved in a flame war, but I'll just say 99% of the
time ideas are worthless. Execution is what matters.

~~~
tjholowaychuk
Not when you have to actually make money haha. Can't really execute without
money, that's the entire point of startups, starve out the little guy with
your free offerings until you can sell the team and hype.

~~~
nodesocket
Well, as somebody who tried building a bootstrapped and self funded Node.js
PaaS competing against Heroku, Dotcloud, and Marak back in 2010[1][2] (the
good ole'days) I am certainly sympathetic to the struggle competing against
well funded companies. Ultimately though, I prefer lifestyle businesses these
days. Funded companies tend to slow down, carry ridiculous baggage, politics,
and usually result in less money in the founders pockets. Being self-funded
and thus moving fast and agile is an advantage.

[1] -
[https://www.google.com/amp/s/venturebeat.com/2011/08/10/node...](https://www.google.com/amp/s/venturebeat.com/2011/08/10/nodesocket/amp/)

[2] -
[https://www.google.com/amp/s/readwrite.com/2011/12/01/first-...](https://www.google.com/amp/s/readwrite.com/2011/12/01/first-
look-at-nodesocket-nodej/amp/)

~~~
tjholowaychuk
Totally agree, but when someone is going to copy you and make it free, not a
lot I can do in that case, at least not to my knowledge.

~~~
nodesocket
Send me an e-mail (in HN profile), I may have some ideas.

------
pseudobry
> Most cloud providers have created different proprietary APIs to expose
> lightweight services to the cloud.

True. However, in the case of Google Cloud Platform, the Protocol Buffer
definitions for their services have been open-sourced here:
[https://github.com/googleapis/googleapis](https://github.com/googleapis/googleapis)

There are two immediate benefits/possibilities: you can generate your own gRPC
client libraries for GCP services and you can re-implement GCP services using
their open-sourced interface definition. One example would be the Google Cloud
Functions Emulator [1], which implements the service defined in the Cloud
Functions service' Protocol Buffer [2]. You could deploy that Emulator
somewhere for a sort-of "dev" version of the production Cloud Functions
service, and the Gcloud SDK could talk to it.

[1]: [https://github.com/GoogleCloudPlatform/cloud-functions-
emula...](https://github.com/GoogleCloudPlatform/cloud-functions-emulator)
[2]:
[https://github.com/googleapis/googleapis/blob/master/google/...](https://github.com/googleapis/googleapis/blob/master/google/cloud/functions/v1beta2/functions.proto)

------
thebiglebrewski
This is really cool. We're a one-man shop (me) that uses Heroku though. Even
though I can get on AWS or GCP really quickly with this (but probably not
because we have a Rails back-end and React/Express front-end), I wouldn't then
know how to best leverage/manage it. So this is a bit of a non-starter for me.

So far I'm seeing this as useful for side projects at most. The layer isn't
opaque enough where I can troubleshoot serious issues and its too new to know
there won't be any. More layers add more complexity in the early stages, over
time though this could get quite compelling.

But it is a really cool thing.

~~~
djsumdog
Yea their every cloud is pretty limited. The world isn't limited to AWS/GCP.
For VM hosting, there's Vultr, DigitalOcean, Linode. And for app hosting you
have Heroku, Jelastic, et. al.

It's difficult to create something that works universally since the APIs can
be radically different. Terraform is a nice attempt to plug in different
hosting solutions and configuration layers (puppet, anisble, chef), but your
configuration still varies pretty heavily per provider and I've often
struggled with it enough that I gave up and just wrote scripts to call my
providers API directly.

~~~
luke3butler
"Aside from "Function as a Service" providers, we also are working hard on
bringing the Now experience to container management solutions such as
Kubernetes. These systems provide a lot of power to their administrators, but
typically don't offer a great "last mile" experience for product developers
and designers."

I'm looking forward to this.

------
cstpdk
Bad luck to announce support for `every cloud` the day alibaba cloud reaches
the frontpage

------
dvcc
I'm a little confused, is this basically a competing service with zeit's
already-abstract 'now' deployment service? Or is this completely separate from
that now service that doesn't even require a zeit account/plan?

~~~
arunoda
(I work at ZEIT)

We just wanted to make "now" the go to tool for cloud deployments.

We've a backend for "now" and that's the pricing we've mentioned on our page.
Just like that, we've providers for AWS, Google Cloud, Azure and etc.

We'll sure make "ZEIT now cloud backend" better everyday. But sometimes, we
just wanna deploy to existing clouds. That's what this is about.

If you decide to deploy to AWS, you don't need to pay nothing for ZEIT.

You can also think like, this is we challenging ourself :)

------
davidjnelson
The docs are very light on technical details. It appears for aws they are
using lambda and API gateway. If so, how do you connect to a sql db that
requires connection pooling?

It looks promising, but it's unclear how to use it for a real app. Perhaps the
idea is you maintain a separate set of servers which talk to your db?

Edit: Autocorrect fix

------
conceptpad
Zeit is simplifying product development and delivery in a very tasteful way.
Thank you and keep going!

------
zitterbewegung
I saw this at the reactriot hackathon. Since it works with multiple clouds I
think I will try to use this from now on. If it allows me to migrate easily
there are distinct advantages especially such as lock-in.

------
nikon
Worth noting the pricing [0]

[0]: [https://zeit.co/pricing](https://zeit.co/pricing)

~~~
luke3butler
This is only if you deploy to their servers.

Other cloud providers are completely separate.

~~~
nikon
Nice. My bad. Realised it's actually open source!

------
DonbunEf7
I use Nix and NixOS and nixops. What can `now` do for me?

