XMPP was supposed to be this. There was a boom in the early to mid-2010s (I worked at HipChat back then, and it was built on top of XMPP). IMO, it works well; it scales, but none of the commercial solutions picked up for whatever reason. In the end, as you say, proprietary protocols like WhatsApp or Slack won the market.
I've heard great things about Matrix. Peeble's founder, Eric, was building Beeper, a chat app with a similar purpose to what you describe (it recently got acquired by Wordpress). I believe that the core was built on top of Matrix, so you might be up to something there.
I'd highly discourage you from using SMS; it's very insecure. I'd go as far as to recommend you not to implement your own auth and instead use something like Auth0, WorkOS, SuperToken, or SSOReady (https://github.com/ssoready/ssoready), among others.
Building auth stacks is not trivial and is not what will make your SaaS successful. The more you can leverage experts to focus on what makes your SaaS special, the better.
Every time I read about Nomad, I wonder the same. I swear I'm not trolling here, I honestly don't get how running Nomad is simpler than Kubernetes. Especially considering that there are substantially more resources and help on Kubernetes than Nomad.
Well, for starters, you don't have to have your apps containerized to work with Nomad (though it can handle containers as well as executables).
But for some deeper details, I'd suggest checking out the comments in this reddit thread[0] (as well as some of the linked articles therein).
E.g. From a comment by /u/Golden_Age_Fallacy: A great use of Nomad is on reduce the burden of on-boarding a team(s) of developers who are unfamiliar with cloud native deployments / systems(even containers!).
Nomad jobspecs are very simple and straight forward, as compared to the complexity and pure option overload you get in k8s and helm.
From /u/neutralized: It's much easier to use than k8s. Easy to setup, easy to manage, much more shallow learning curve. Nothing super fancy. Just works. I migrated a startup I was at off of a self-managed k8s setup to Nomad a few years ago and they've never looked back.
From /u/esity: My team is currently building out a fully automated nomad cluster service offering internally(fortune 10)
It's super awesome. Easy. Little headache. Integrates with consul and vault. We are literally planning to replace thousands of vms for K8s with nomad. Containers are faster, more resilient and writing hcl is actually fun once you learn it
Now, there is a rather more lengthy comment, by /u/thomasbuchinger, that goes through the pros and cons he experienced in trying Nomad out and his conclusion is that, while he wouldn't discourage anyone from using it, "k3s and a few well-known simple projects give you 80% of Nomands [sic] features. Are as easy to operate, afford you more options in the future and have a ton of documentation/tutorials...available."
There are more comments in the thread and again links to a bunch of blogposts/articles/etc., including one from fly.io that seemed pretty detailed, discussing the Googly origins of both k8s and Nomad (fly.io used Nomad but found that it wasn't the best fit for them, which is also discussed in their post -- actually, I'm going to put the link to their post below[1], since I think it is worthwhile).
I agree with @metaltyphoon on this. Even for small teams, a managed version of Kubernetes takes away most of the pain. I've used both ECS+Fargate and Kubernetes, but these days, I prefer Kubernetes mainly because the ecosystem is way bigger, both vendor and open source. Most of the problems we run into are always one search or open source project away.
The most significant value I get from Costco is that the quality is consistently high and the options are well curated. I like not having to go through 100s of brands of basic staples like yogurt, toilet paper, milk, etc...
Personally I've found that "well curated" sometimes becomes a double-edged sword in Costco's case. Mainstream brands can be expected to be available perennially; however, smaller/niche items and brands will often get cycled out or replaced by something else which may or may not be comparable.
Many times I've found products at Costco that I enjoy, only for them to suddenly stop carrying them a week or a month later.
A typical grocery store will carry on the order of 40,000 unique products. Costco is hard limited to a max of 3,700 unique products. If a store wants to bring a new product in, something must be rotated out. This also means that if a product wants to stay in Costco, it has to sell a certain minimum number of pallets, per month, to be worth it.
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