Anurag Goel, Render founder and CEO, discusses the infrastructure behind a PaaS. Topics include challenges in scaling infrastructure, managing Kubernetes clusters, open source contributions, and ensuring platform resilience. Emphasizing learning through problem solving, feedback loops, and adaptability in technology decision-making.
Render focuses on simplifying cloud operations for developers by providing higher-level products and features.
The importance of prioritizing customer needs to drive business decisions and enhance the user experience.
Emphasis on well-defined processes, observability, and proactive bug fixing for software disaster recovery scenarios.
Deep dives
Innovative User Feedback Feature at Sentry
Sentry's product manager, Jasmine Cassis, introduces a new user feedback feature allowing developers to collect user input efficiently. This feature bridges the gap between developers and end-users, capturing additional bugs like broken links or typos that may be missed by automated detection systems. The user feedback widget integrates with Sentry's rich debugging context and telemetry, providing detailed feedback, including session replays and screenshots.
Platform Evolution and Challenges at Render
Render's CEO and founder, Anurag Goel, discusses the evolution and challenges of their platform. He explains the transition from bare metal to cloud infrastructure, emphasizing the importance of focusing on the value provided to users over purely technological considerations. Render aims to simplify cloud operations for application developers, focusing on higher-level products and features that enhance user experience.
Strategic Directions and Focus of Render
Render's strategic focus revolves around raising the abstraction level in the cloud, emphasizing value delivered to users over technical intricacies. Rather than becoming a managed Kubernetes provider, Render aims to innovate at a higher layer in the cloud ecosystem, providing advanced features like feature flags and progressive rollouts. The company's vision is to simplify complex architectures for businesses and empower application developers with efficient cloud solutions.
Focusing on Customer Needs
The podcast episode emphasizes the importance of focusing on customer needs to drive business decisions. By prioritizing the customer experience, companies can better navigate challenges in scaling startups. For instance, the episode discusses how Render opted for building object storage instead of GPUs based on customer feedback, showcasing a customer-centric approach to product development. Prioritizing customer needs not only helps in quicker decision-making but also enables companies to align their services with actual customer demands.
Lessons from Software Disaster Recovery
The episode delves into the significance of well-defined processes and observability in software disaster recovery scenarios. Through a real-life incident of a company losing its entire account due to an overlooked internal tool default, the importance of robust processes and alert mechanisms becomes evident. It highlights the need for continuous monitoring, feedback mechanisms, and proactive bug fixing to avoid unexpected software failures. The discussion underscores the trade-offs between portable setups and deeper control, emphasizing the importance of maintaining open-source projects and investing in knowledge sharing within the engineering community for resilience in complex software environments.
Render founder/CEO Anurag Goel joins us for a look behind their platform. An application native hosting option that hides the lower levels still requires a LOT of infrastructure.
Changelog++ members save 6 minutes on this episode because they made the ads disappear. Join today!
Sponsors:
Sentry – Code breaks, fix it faster. Don’t just observe. Take action. Sentry is the only app monitoring platform built for developers that gets to the root cause for every issue. 90,000+ growing teams use sentry to find problems fast. Use the code CHANGELOG when you sign up to get $100 OFF the team plan.
Neo4j – Is your code getting dragged down by JOINs and long query times? The problem might be your database…Try simplifying the complex with graphs. Stop asking relational databases to do more than they were made for. Graphs work well for use cases with lots of data connections like supply chain, fraud detection, real-time analytics, and genAI. With Neo4j, you can code in your favorite programming language and against any driver. Plus, it’s easy to integrate into your tech stack.
