from Hacker News

Show HN: Shuttle – Build and ship backends without writing infrastructure files

by dohman on 10/4/23, 11:51 AM with 66 comments

  • by gdcbe on 10/4/23, 3:05 PM

    I use shuttle to deploy some side Rust projects for my web facing parts. I love it.

    They are also planning to allow you to host it yourself via a docker setup, in your basement or cloud. For now I’m just doing it via their service and gladly pay for it.

    If you’re well versed into DevOps related activities you might find it odd that there’s a need for it. But personally I’m a father of 3 kids, have been a developer and and hacker for last 12 years or so, and while I could do AWS, gcloud or a VPS myself, I honestly rather spend that time on my product then infra worries. So far I haven’t experienced any issues with them and they are very friendly folks, always ready to help. They’ll also be at EuroRust next week.

    If you’re like me someone who likes to develop stuff but not so much the deployment side of things, then honestly this is nice.

    There’s honestly no lock-in:

    1. You’re service (project) can easily be converted into a regular project, as shuttle is in code only visible in a minimal way, so you can fairly easily refactor it out of your project the day you want to switch away 2. And like I said they’ll allow to self host soon enough.

    So maybe you can give it a try. Might be the accelerator you need to help you start a project / business idea. Even if just to get you started.

  • by ctvo on 10/4/23, 1:55 PM

    Infrastructure from code is the least exciting development in the evolution of ops I've seen.

    Helping manage complexity -- great. Pulumi, Terraform, the CDK, all of these infrastructure as code tools help manage complexity.

    Hiding complexity behind a DSL, via comments attached to methods intermingled with code or annotations -- not great.

    Some of these implementations are my business logic -> your DSL via annotations or comments -> <Some other IaC DSL> -> CloudFormation -> AWS. At some point the returns are diminished as you add more layers vs. the cost of operating what's generated and trying to debug issues.

  • by jbotdev on 10/4/23, 12:04 PM

    Seems ironic that you’d use rust to “build fast”. My impression is that Rust is more about building things safe/correct and efficient, with developer productivity being lower relative to other modern languages.

    That said, the “infrastructure-from-code” idea is interesting. I’m not a big fan of coupling your code to your infra, but I’m intrigued by the idea of inferring infra dependencies from existing application code.

  • by lucgagan on 10/4/23, 12:08 PM

    From my experience with Rust, there is nothing fast about developing with it.

  • by brainbag on 10/4/23, 12:55 PM

    I've been surprised at how much I like Rust for backend work, but looking at the read me I have no idea what the case for this tool is. What do you use it for?

  • by eandre on 10/4/23, 12:33 PM

    If you like the concept but prefer Go over Rust for backends, check out Encore [1]. Disclosure: I'm one of the founders.

    [1] https://encore.dev

  • by turtlebits on 10/4/23, 6:18 PM

    Without infrastructure files means polluting your code with vendor specific lines. I'm not sure how much better that is.

    I'm not so keen on a single language only SaaS either. How many companies only deploy code in a single language?

  • by kevincox on 10/4/23, 6:36 PM

    > Is Shuttle Secure?

    > We build and deploy every project in its own container. This gives you safe isolation from other users and all the other projects that are owned by your account.

    So that's a "no". Containers are not strong security boundaries. Probably good enough between projects owned by your own account, but definitely not for between other users.

  • by lijok on 10/4/23, 12:03 PM

    Now this is how you turn a language mainstream.

  • by jeffypoo on 10/4/23, 12:40 PM

    Not sure if being so opinionated about Rust is a good idea, but very cool nonetheless. Looks well done, excited to tire kick it.

    Curious how you see this stacking up against things like Pulumi?

  • by sbt567 on 10/4/23, 1:41 PM

    It would be great if there are some kind of code snippet on the README that really demonstrate the "ship backends without writing infra" feature that I think is one of the unique feature of shuttle. I remember seeing one on the official website (https://shuttle.rs) that left me impressed.

  • by rubenfiszel on 10/4/23, 1:35 PM

    We do a bit the same at windmill.dev except for python and typescript and we parse the parameters directly from the signature without needing to use macros/annotations. I wonder if the same could not have been done here where the macro would have been as a build processor.

  • by kjfarm on 10/4/23, 12:29 PM

    My brain read this as “Build Back, Ends Fast.”

    I thought trends were changing so quickly I now miss them before I even know about them. Glad I still have a few years left of semi-keeping pace

  • by irf1 on 10/4/23, 12:38 PM

    interviewed the CEO on the OSS founder podcast earlier this year :)

    full interview (38min): https://youtube.com/watch?v=GBT7yp17P4Y

    highlights (10min): https://youtube.com/watch?v=TVco_9E9no8

  • by TruthWillHurt on 10/4/23, 12:52 PM

    Good luck competing with AWS! went great for my serverless platform startup (and everyone else..)

  • by willsmith72 on 10/4/23, 3:04 PM

    Maybe the title should specify "rust backends" or "rust applications"

  • by revskill on 10/4/23, 12:45 PM

    The easy done right ! Rust + Postgres on a stateful server for CRUD apps.

  • by akerr on 10/4/23, 12:05 PM

    Oh, “build backends fast”.

  • by MichaelMug on 10/4/23, 6:16 PM

    Is there anything like this for the Python/Django world?

  • by iio7 on 10/4/23, 6:26 PM

    Yes, let's have even more of people just writing code and not knowing anything about how anything works! Just what we need more of.

  • by 0xbadcafebee on 10/4/23, 3:18 PM

    HN bingo card for the comments thus far:

      [x] mentions Rust
  [x] mentions Go
  [x] misunderstanding the word DevOps
  [x] compares product to Heroku
  [x] "I just want to write code and make/run a product and not know how that works"
  [x] something about scaling
  [x] the solution to any problem is to write more code