
Netlify raises $53M Series C as microservices approach to web development grows - 135792468
https://techcrunch.com/2020/03/04/netfily-nabs-53m-series-c-as-micro-services-approach-to-web-development-grows/
======
veeralpatel979
I've used Netlify as a "Heroku for static sites".

I deploy my React apps and landing pages there and don't need to worry about
the underlying compute, or load balancing, or anything else. Thankfully I
didn't do any frontend work before Netlify was available!

I don't really get all the hype around the Jamstack
([https://jamstack.org/](https://jamstack.org/)), though.

Netlify's hypothesis seems to be that if you deploy websites on CDNs, instead
of on web servers, then you'll get better performance.

Also, because it's just a static site, there's no backend or database, so you
get better security.

I accept this hypothesis, but it seems like you still need a backend. Netlify
is promoting functions as a service [1] so you can avoid having web servers
for the backend too, but I'm a little skeptical you get the flexibility to
build applications with dependencies or non-trivial business logic or design
with this approach.

If anyone's tried a FaaS and this is incorrect, please describe your
experience!

[1]
[https://www.netlify.com/products/functions/](https://www.netlify.com/products/functions/)

~~~
jacobpake
In my experience you can achieve a lot with FaaS - but you still need an API,
database and storage - which Netlify Functions doesn’t offer out of the box. I
have a couple of sites deployed on Netlify with a ‘serverless’ backend
deployed to AWS separately.

Their functions are also limited to triggers relating only to Netlify events:
[https://docs.netlify.com/functions/trigger-on-
events/#availa...](https://docs.netlify.com/functions/trigger-on-
events/#available-triggers)

~~~
VWWHFSfQ
Netlify is glorified S3 + Cloudfront hosting.

They did a very good job at marketing "HTML5 hosting"

~~~
dexterdog
It's glorified in the sense that it's much cheaper. I have had small sites on
s3 plus cf and have gotten a bill that boggles the mind because I could be
hosting the content for free on netlify.

~~~
speleding
Make sure that you've set the correct cache control headers on the S3 objects.
So "Max age" should be something far future for static assets and something
near future for HTML files.

If you forget that then Cloudfront will retrieve the objects from S3 every
time there is any activity on your site and your bill will go up really fast.

~~~
nicoburns
This is precisely why netlify's offering is valuable. It works out of the box
with zero config. If you're using a common static site generator you don't
even need to setup the build process, just give it your git repo, and push
when you want to deploy.

~~~
debaserab2
That's not really a compelling reason when it's literally a single input field
on a form to setup. Also, if you're in the business of web development, HTTP
cache control headers are something you should know about regardless.

~~~
nicoburns
As with a lot of AWS, it's easy if you know you need to do it, but there are a
lot of gotchas which can be very expensive if hit (and there's no way to limit
expenditure).

------
neya
I am an experienced user and avid customer of Netlify. Netlify is amazing for
small sites, blogs and what not. But as you go up in traffic, that's when you
start to realize how over-priced their charges are, atleast for bandwidth. I'm
not saying they're bad, they still need to get back all the money they lose on
their free users. But for enterprise customers, it's really bad.

I'll give you an example - My client has a high traffic website with over
300TB of bandwidth which is being served via cloudflare on a $20/mo plan
(probably free plan also works well I guess).

Migrating this to Netlify would cost us roughly $6000 per month. (Netlify
charges $20/1000GB). To me that's insane if you really want to adopt JAMstack.

For 6 grand, I can host an elaborate GCP setup with load balancers on compute
engine. Or I can have a dozen instances on AppEngine all automatically
handling my load for me. What am I missing?

This is not to say I don't like static sites - it's a different thing. I am
100% proponent of static sites, maybe just not Netlify.

~~~
NiekvdMaas
FYI: 300 TB egress at standard GCP pricing is already more than $17k.

~~~
neya
Which product? Cloud Storage?? Is there Cloud CDN (or some other CDN) on top?
If not, it's not surprising. With a proper CDN setup (say with Cloudflare)
that number should be much lower than that of Netlify. Particularly with
Cloudflare since your CDN cost is almost 0.

FYI Netlify doesn't work well with Cloudflare. That's the reason why it's so
expensive as a standalone option.

[https://community.netlify.com/t/how-do-i-use-cloudflare-
dns-...](https://community.netlify.com/t/how-do-i-use-cloudflare-dns-with-a-
netlify-custom-domain/1557)

~~~
NiekvdMaas
I'm talking about regular network egress. CDN egress is cheaper, but still
$13k+ and more depending on destination/cache hit rate/etc.

------
PudgePacket
I like netlify but it's weird how little them seem to do. They released
analytics like a year ago and it's had almost no improvement/progress, lots of
people on the forums clamoring for more and it just seems to fall on deaf
ears.

I paid for the per-site analytics for a few months, the server side analytics
means it captures much more of the traffic than client-side GA style, but the
metrics available were just too basic for any real commercial use.

~~~
spacedome
This has been my issue as well, I started using their analytics when it
launched. I thought they must still be working on it from the state its in, it
is absolutely not worth the cost currently. You cannot even see the data from
the previous months! Despite having paid $9 for them just to store page view
totals.

------
danr4
> Netlify’s co-founder Chris Bach says they weren’t looking for new funding,
> but felt with the company growing rapidly, it would be prudent to take the
> money to help continue that growth.

Never understood this. Is there an example of a company that took funding
"just in case" and it was worth it?

I love Netlify (my business currently depends on it), but I'm getting the idea
they are feeling the pressure of "We got something big we have to make it as
big as possible", which is not inherently bad but in Netlify's case could
easily take the product in the wrong way.

Their focus on enterprises especially worries me, as their current feature set
works amazingly for "indie hackers" and small businesses.

~~~
npunt
Its smart to raise money when money is cheap (right before a recession),
especially if your business is particularly dependent on business from other
startups. The startups-serving-startups ecosystem is incredibly fragile to
downturns.

------
GusRuss89
I've always been an indie hacker, more adept at building applications/front
ends than infrastructure and devops, so things like Netlify, Zeit Now,
Firebase etc make a lot of sense to me because they abstract those parts away.

I've recently started at my first enterprise contract (10+ years into my
career) in the cloud team (as a front-end engineer building the interface to a
cloud console) and am amazed at the level of resources poured into
infrastructure and devops.

I'm obviously new to enterprise - and there are probably reasons I'm not aware
of that prevent them from going all in on things like static site hosts and
managed infrastructure - but I do feel that there's a lot of room for
enterprise to shift in this direction.

~~~
pm90
Enterprises have infrastructure teams because they have applications that need
to solve business logic that cannot be solved by static sites alone. Even the
simplest businesses invest in data processing pipelines to extract value from
their data. When the scale of data processing becomes very large, they need to
rearchitect their systems in different ways to better handle that kind of
traffic.

So it helps to have in house infrastructure teams that can somewhat
consolidate and invest in long term planning and architecture for computer
systems and services required by these enterprises.

------
throwaway77384
I've hosted a few things on Netlify's free tier. Very, very convenient, I must
say.

A bit like Heroku also.

And just like with Heroku, you get the nice free offering and the second you
out-grow that, costs explode like crazy (and leave you wishing you'd just
rolled your own anyway).

For example, you have to pay $19/month/site for 1,000 form submissions on
Netlify.

Say it with me: PER site, $19/month, 1,000 form submissions. I am not sure how
they can possibly justify charging that much.

~~~
nicoburns
Yeah, I think as soon as you need "backend" functionality, netlify is no
longer a good option.

~~~
bpicolo
Still fine to deploy your frontend there, if it's a SPA.

------
troquerre
Can anyone who's used both Netlify and Zeit comment on how the two compare? I
personally use Zeit and I really like their interface. The work they've been
doing with nextjs has also been very interesting.

~~~
cobaimelan
also zeit fast for build, netlify build tool overload and over price

------
le_didil
I think Netlify's success has got nothing to do with "microservices". The new
(not so new now actually) trend that allowed it to prosper is when people
started splitting up backend-rendered webapps (where the backend was
effectively rendering most of the html, classic mvc/rails style) into a static
frontend/single page app making api calls to an api backend (or multiple but
it doesn't really matter here)

------
youngtaff
Scraping away the JAMStack hype…

Netlify's core USP appears to be making the process of deploying and operating
a static site easier - auto-deploys from GitHub in build process, HTTPS cert
management, simple CDN config etc.

Claimed 'performance' gains come from static hosting closer to visitors but
AFAIK their CDN runs on AWS, and relies on nginx which means HTTP/2
prioritisation is broken - they've got a lot of work to catch up with Akamai,
Fastly or Cloudflare on this front.

The whole JAMStack approach seems to result in companies re-inventing the
wheel in non-performant ways - Contentful CMS delivers sites via Netlify but
all the content is requested as JSON which JS components then render to the
page.

Taking away the deploy pain is definitely a win for many of use but it's
something I could imagine Cloudflare launching, which coupled with their other
features - image optimisation, edge workers etc could probably blow Netlify
out of the water

~~~
erquhart
Couple of clarifications:

\- Netlify is multi-cloud:
[https://www.netlify.com/products/edge/](https://www.netlify.com/products/edge/)

\- Content from a headless CMS like Contentful is generally retrieved at build
time, not rendered in the browser

~~~
youngtaff
Doesn't matter if it's multi-cloud or not, the HTTP server Netlify are using
still has HTTP/2 issues

Suggest you look at at few more Contentful sites in DevTools the Contentful
site itself has no content in it's HTML and requests all content as JSON which
is then rendered via JS components.

The content is in all the page-data.json responses in this waterfall -
[https://www.webpagetest.org/result/200307_EQ_e60b0b3388b452b...](https://www.webpagetest.org/result/200307_EQ_e60b0b3388b452b8d01001bccab5a0b8/1/details/#waterfall_view_step1)

------
sl1ck731
Throwing "microservices" in there seems like a reach. I'm not familiar with
Netlify, other than the static content generator CMS thing, but I don't see
how its more beneficial to a microservice design versus any other API backend.

~~~
crabasa
It's not a reach at all if you've been keeping up with their product offerings
[1] [2] [3].

[1]
[https://www.netlify.com/products/functions/](https://www.netlify.com/products/functions/)

[2]
[https://www.netlify.com/products/forms/](https://www.netlify.com/products/forms/)

[3]
[https://www.netlify.com/products/analytics/](https://www.netlify.com/products/analytics/)

~~~
webo
I don’t understand how these 3 offerings prove your point? I wouldn’t consider
AWS Lambda as a microservice partern.

~~~
TomMarius
FaaS seems to be the microservices concept taken to the extreme

------
nojvek
Netlify makes it easy to deploy static sites. I’ve used it and it’s been a
decent experience. Their UI is quite complex and the notifications are
annoying (they don’t turn themselves off after you read them).

GitHub can roll out something like this very easily. They already have GitHub
actions and GitHub pages. Netlify’s core proposition is when you commit to a
branch, a build command is run that outputs assets to a directory. Netlify
will put those assets in a cdn. You can route your custom domain and they’ll
provision the letsencrypt very for you and you have a https site. Boom!

They have other value adds like forms which seem quite overpriced. That’s when
you need a db.

Overall my experience is that it’s good to get something out of the door but
you prolly will need to move to a cloud provider if you need full control like
caching headers and any form of backend.

Basically as a dev all I want is something simple. Here’s my script that
builds the frontend. Here’s the docker files for various services. Here’s my
requirements for a database. Lastly here’s my routing rules of urls to
different docker services and how to scale them. Go host it and give me a good
log analyzer so I can monitor how things are operating.

Render.com has nice things but there’s definitely value in simplifying most
webapps deployments and still making the whole thing dirt cheap to operate.

------
celim307
Can someone clue me in on the benefit of Netlify over say, S3 bucket fronted
by cloudfront? Seems like the cloudfront solution is much cheaper with not
much more dev time investment

~~~
dna_polymerase
Yeah, but does your S3 bucket talk about something called JAMStack the whole
day? \s

There isn't really an advantage. It is static page hosting. I remember the
days when you would just FTP those sites onto a server, serve with Apache and
call it a day, but I guess everything needs to be behind a CDN these days.

------
philipkiely
I just switched to Netlify from GitHub Pages a little under two weeks ago. The
process of setting up DNS and switching everything over was seamless, I'm very
pleased with the site under the free plan. I was choosing between Netlify and
AWS and chose Netlify due to simplicity and a better free tier, even though it
costs a bit more (or theoretically would in the long run).

A bit of economics:

The free plan offers 300 minutes of build and 100 GB of bandwidth. To compare,
AWS S3 offers 20,000 GET requests for free. Given my pages average about 1
megabyte (other stuff is served from third-party CDNs, which are free). Thus 1
GB of bandwidth is approximately 1000 page views. In other words, Netlify
offers about 5X as many free page views per month as AWS. I'm under absolutely
no danger of getting to 100K page views, in a good month I get a couple of
thousand. However, let's assume that I start writing better content and more
people read it, like more than 100,000 page views per month. In that case,
Netlify overage costs 20 cents per GB, AWS costs 9 cents. Overall, "at scale"
Netlify is about twice as expensive as AWS S3 for static sites, but it's
better at modest scale.

~~~
pm90
What made you leave gh pages?

~~~
nojvek
AFAIAK GitHub pages require that the built files are stored in the repo.

Netlify checks out the repo, runs the build command and then takes files from
your dist directory. I’d love for GitHub pages to behave like this. A much
simpler setup.

~~~
pm90
Well, you can technically push the src changes to `master` branch, have a
github action build + update a `deploy` branch and then have gh pages read
from there.

------
subpixel
I’ve used Netlify to host small business client brochure sites and everyone is
happy.

But I did it on the free plan.

I’m quite unsure where the valuation comes from.

~~~
swyx
what valuation do you impute from a $53m Series C? (i have no knowledge, but
am curious)

~~~
raiyu
Hard to say but i would gather 10-20% dilution. Later rounds are less so
valuation $250-$500MM

SaaS valuations have reached all time highs companies doing $2MM ARR are
raising at $100MM+ post

------
sergiotapia
I don't know about all those extra feature, but to ship a static create-react-
app, netlify has made my life super easy. Happy customer here. I hope they
keep their core offerings solid and don't go crazy with new features to
justify the Series C.

------
captn3m0
I run endoflife.date on top of Netlify, and it has been great. Deploy previews
are amazing and a life-saver.

------
brtkdotse
I really wish Netlify would start charging money for their core service, which
is SUPER slick. A pretty big portion of their offering is that they don't just
do hosting, but also do CI/CD for static sites, which is incredibly
convenient.

I currently pay $18 for analytics for my podcast page
([https://kompilator.se](https://kompilator.se)) and my agency's page
([https://yoisho.se](https://yoisho.se)), just to pay _something_, but the
quality of the "analytics" is unfortunately extremely sub-par compare to the
rest of their service.

------
hellofunk
For the love of God why does TechCrunch hijack the browser back button.

------
marktangotango
MetLify really exploded when we several other static hosting services didn’t.
Kind reader, what are your thoughts on why that was?

~~~
sergiotapia
UX.

You can do similar stuff on AWS, like host a create-react-app but the aws ux
is terrible.

~~~
bunsenhoneydew
Now they’ve put in Amplify Console it’s a lot better for this kind of work,
personally I’m a big fan.

~~~
sergiotapia
I was specifically referring to amplify console. it's still terrible UX
compared to netlify.

