Photo by Thao Le Hoang on Unsplash
Are you a founder or running your business on the cloud? Are you frustrated with your recurring cloud maintenance, DevOps salaries, and cloud costs?
Render is a new startup that claims to be much better, faster, and easier to maintain than AWS, Heroku, GCP, and others. Unlike Heroku and AWS, where you need to have a separate dev-ops team to maintain your applications running in the cloud, Render makes it a one-click process.
Yes! Render is a completely automated cloud provider. It can host Web apps, APIs, Docker files, Cron jobs, and a lot more, without the need of any maintenance by you. This means that your startup can focus more on their product without having to maintain a separate dev-ops team and caring about cloud maintenance. Render even won the Tech Crunch SF Disrupt 2019.
Bad news for you if you are a DevOps Engineer.
What I will cover —
On Average, US DevOps salary is $104,000 and the ideal size of the DevOps team is 5 engineers. There are over 660,000 DevOps engineers in the US. This means that companies spend over $68 billion annually on cloud maintenance and DevOps salaries.
Managed cloud services such as Heroku costs $250/month for just 2 GB of RAM without SSD’s and private networking. Render costs just $25 for the same and it provides SSD’s and private networking.
These costs can be a big deal for small businesses, startups, and hobbyists. The second biggest reason, startups fail is because of Funding. They run out of cash and cannot keep up with costs, create good quality products, or pivot according to the market. Render provides startups with automated cloud saving them hundreds of thousands of dollars in salary costs and a lot of time in cloud maintenance.
In September 2019, augmented reality startup Daqri shut down after burning through more than $250M in funding and failing to raise a new round from investors — CBinsights
What Render can do
Render is automated, so it can manage all your apps running in the cloud with none of your involvement.
Render let’s you deploy anything from simple static websites to complex application clusters. It can handle APIs, web apps, Docker files, and much more.
It can build and deploy code to the cloud, handle security updates, automatically scale, load balance the resources, and monitor and alert the user on any issues. By just clicking on the ‘deploy to render button’ all these tasks can be automated.
Every Render service gets service discovery, private networking, and load balancing.
Render offers SSD’s with automatic backups and one-click restore features.
Render has developed a concept called ‘infrastructure as code’. This allows developers to define their infrastructure requirements in a YAML file. Current infrastructure can be updated by simply changing this file and pushing it to git.
Render gives you the ability to spin up automated object storage in the cloud. Amazon S3 and other cloud storage options require you to use virtual machines in the cloud, attach storage, manage backup, and take care of all the handling and managing tasks forever. Render makes it automated with Render disk.
Render gives you the flexibility to run your workload on both AWS and GCP in different regions simultaneously with just a single clip. Such an option is not provided by AWS or GCP.
Render provides you with an add-ons market place, using which you can integrate other services such as LogDNA, scout, and other services.
What Render can’t do
Render can’t work with Deep Learning and Ml models on the cloud. It is not good for GPU based workloads.
They do not have their own underlying infrastructure. Render uses GCP and AWS to store all the data and make the maintained cloud possible. But they are planning to shift to bare-metal clusters in the future
Render is not the best solution in terms of infrastructural costs as it uses GCP and AWS to operate and thus will be expensive than them. Render aims at minimizing the operational costs for startups and small companies by automating cloud maintenance tasks that traditionally require a Dev Ops team.
Render is not designed for large enterprises, it cannot handle thousands of machines at once, as of now. They target startups, individuals, and businesses who don’t have resources to hire a separate Dev-Ops team.
Render can surely replace Dev Ops requirements for startups, sole developers, and companies by automating their cloud requirements and all the cloud workflow, but it cannot replace this requirement for large enterprises and established companies.
It is also not a viable solution for a startup that needs to handle a large amount of data and is growing rapidly because they will inevitably have to shift to AWS or other providers to meet their requirements if Render cannot grow at the same rate. Render is planning to meet these requirements in the long term but does not provide this solution as of now.
This means that large organizations and growing startups will still need DevOps engineers. So, a big relief for you if you are a Dev Ops engineer.
As Render relies on AWS and GCP as of now these cloud providers are harmless. But Render aims at shifting to bare metal and provides for a specific niche of startups and businesses. It will take away this market segment from AWS, GCP, or any other platform.
