Brandon Bayer, CEO Flightcontrol: How to unlock peak velocity on AWS

Links

- Sponsors and Partners

- Codecrafters (sponsor): https://tej.as/codecrafters

- THAT Conference: https://www.thatconference.com/

- Stately: https://stately.ai

- Guest Content

- Flightcontrol: https://www.flightcontrol.dev

- Blitz.js: https://blitzjs.com/

- Brandon on X: https://x.com/flybayer

- Book Recommendations and Resources

- Full type-safety for Next.js routes: https://www.flightcontrol.dev/blog/fix-nextjs-routing-to-have-full-type-safety

- Obviously Awesome: https://www.aprildunford.com/books

- Psych framework: https://andrewchen.com/psychd-funnel-conversion/

- Tejas on X: https://x.com/tejaskumar_

Summary

Brandon Bayer, the creator of Blitz.js and co-founder of Flightcontrol discusses his journey in open source and the challenges of building full-stack frameworks in the JavaScript ecosystem. He explains the motivation behind creating Flightcontrol, a platform-as-a-service for deploying production applications to your own AWS account.

Brandon also shares insights into the pricing model of Flightcontrol and the trade-offs between using a platform-as-a-service and self-hosting with a VPS. He discusses the technical challenges of migrating from PlanetScale to AWS Aurora and highlights the benefits of using Flightcontrol for long-running function invocations.

Flightcontrol was backed by Y Combinator (YC)—an experience that was instrumental in helping Flightcontrol raise funding and providing valuable mentorship and networking opportunities.

Takeaways

1. Building full-stack frameworks in the JavaScript ecosystem is challenging due to the complexity and fast-changing nature of the ecosystem.

2. Flightcontrol is a platform-as-a-service that allows developers to deploy production applications to their own AWS account, providing reliability, flexibility, and performance.

3. Self-hosting with a VPS offers more control and lower costs, but it requires more management and may not be suitable for large-scale startups.

4. Flightcontrol enables arbitrarily long-running function invocations, making it suitable for tasks like web scraping and data processing.

5. Flightcontrol is focused on removing barriers to adoption and improving their marketing and positioning

6. The Y Combinator experience helped Flightcontrol raise funding and provided valuable mentorship and networking opportunities

Chapters

00:00 Brandon Bayer

03:41 Introduction and Background

17:05 The Pricing Model of Flightcontrol and the Trade-Offs of Platform-as-a-Service vs. Self-Hosting

53:23 Removing Barriers to Adoption

1:00:23 Marketing and Positioning as a Reliable Platform as a Service

1:13:07 Accepting the Truth and Embracing It

1:22:55 The Impact of Y Combinator

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