Launch HN: Webiny (YC W21) – Open-source serverless framework with a drop-in CMS
After 10 years of running a web development agency and delivering over 100 projects, we tried many different approaches to building apps and websites. When we looked at the patterns for most of the projects we delivered, it was always a combination of custom business logic and a way to manage content, like pages, news articles, and similar. Looking at the options available on the market, we either had frameworks for building the custom logic or ready-made CMS solutions for managing the content. There was no combination for when we wanted to do both. And this is one of the biggest pains we had. We would either force custom logic inside a CMS and break things or make them hard to maintain, or use a framework and take much longer to deliver a project since we'd end up building a custom CMS and making the whole thing more expensive to the client. On top of that, we were just tired of constantly spinning up servers, managing container images, worrying about uptime, network, and security issues, and paying for resources we were not utilizing 100%.
Looking for options, we discovered serverless. The premise of not having infrastructure to manage sounded really intriguing. Having fault-tolerant resources that scale automatically when you need them with consumption-based pricing that cost up to 80% less than virtual machines sounded like the ideal solution...until we tried to build something with it. It was almost impossible. All the existing frameworks and CMS options are designed for a "server environment", and couldn't be used to build solutions in a serverless environment. The only tutorials available at that time covered how to resize an image with a Lambda function. Besides that, serverless requires a cognitive change of how you approach code and infrastructure.
In all those problems we saw an opportunity. Over a course of a year, we built a framework that allows anyone to quickly build serverless applications without battling all the challenges that come with it. Things like rendering and caching pages, optimizing the cold-start times, debugging function calls, managing connections between functions and the database, CI/CD setup, and many more. The framework comes with a GraphQL API, Admin UI, ACL, CLI for deployment and scaffolding, and more.
Because our passion is also tied to content management systems, we decided to eat our own dog food and build a serverless CMS using our own framework. Webiny Serverless CMS uses Lambda functions, API Gateway, DynamoDB, Elasticsearch (the only non-serverless component at the moment) and S3. It scales automatically together with the demand, requires minimal maintenance, and costs a fraction when compared to solutions running on virtual machines or containers. It includes a GraphQL API, asset management, and a no-code builder for static pages and forms. It takes 2 commands to install and configure the whole thing. Today it runs only on AWS, but we plan to introduce the support for other clouds in the future. With our CMS, we hope people will be more confident in the abilities serverless brings to the market, especially when building full-stack solutions. To put some numbers behind our product, we made a benchmark to demonstrate the performance and cost of a Webiny full-stack serverless application[1].
Both the framework and the CMS are free and open-source[2] under the MIT license. We do have a paid enterprise offering for those that require support and additional features [3].
Give Webiny a spin: https://www.webiny.com/. We would love to know what you think!
Resources:
[1] Benchmark - https://docs.webiny.com/docs/webiny-overview/performance-ben...<...
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[ 3.6 ms ] story [ 88.8 ms ] threadWith the enterprise package, we're looking at companies with over 250 employees as that's where the biggest penetration of serverless adoption is happening (source: https://www.datadoghq.com/state-of-serverless/). We also estimate that with 90% cloud penetration in this segment of companies, and with over 4M companies with more than 250 employees in the world (asia mainly drives this number), and with 30% of them using serverless services, there are around 1M potential customers, bringing the total TAM to $50bn.
It helps if we could see more details about the architecture.
I always find it obnoxious and baffling that any company would delegate bug fixes to (current) paid customers. Either you're proud of your work and want to fix mistakes, or not. To blow off bug reports and bugs from anyone is a mistake.
I wish you the biggest success, it's much needed :)
BTW: My comment was for the "Low target" guy.
Thanks for the encouragement!
What's the cost from a cloud provider for this if a site has no traffic or very very small amount of traffic i.e. for a small personal site?
We're looking to add plugins for Elasticsearch so you can replace it with something like Algolia making the whole thing 100% serverless. In that case, the cost would be zero, as it would be 100% under the AWS free tier. Once the free tier expires, the cost would probably be in cents. Have a look at our performance benchmark reports, we've noted down the cost of each test in detail for each of the AWS services: https://docs.webiny.com/docs/webiny-overview/performance-ben...
The features we built into our apps and framework are directly taken from our own experience (we used to run a digital agency for 10 years), user feedback and many hours of calls with other agencies and enterprises. We do love user feedback as we can't possibly foresee all the possible use-cases - and that's how we improve our platform.
If you don't use GraphQL or DynamoDB - that's perfectly fine. There will always be problems that are easier to solve without bringing a full featured framework into the mix. We also like to spawn a Lambda or two with some simple code for simple solutions. But for larger projects, we offer project organization, workflows, infrastructure organization, system of plugins, and ready-made apps which can really save you a lot of development time.
Regarding other CMS's - yes there are many. But not many that are open-source and running in a serverless environment. SaaS solutions are not acceptable for every type of customer, especially not enterprises. They want to have their data in their own private cloud.
Maybe there is a product already out there that does that, but it’ll be useful if google sheet can work in conjunction with your CMS.
Regarding an integration between google sheets and our CMS, we don't offer one out of the box, but if you create a lambda function on Webiny that pulls data from your google sheet, you can use the GraphQL API to then sync the data into the CMS.
A: "We don't host a public demo at this time. You're welcome to install it yourself, or book a call with us and we'll prepare a demo for you."
Investing the time to install it ourselves or book a demo just to see the framework in action adds a lot of friction.
You might want to considering moving the 7 minute Webiny overview to a more prominent place - I didn't see the thumbnail under your navigation's Product menu until after hunting through numerous other pages, poking through getting started tutorials, and even ending up on your documentation page.
[0] https://www.webiny.com/pricing
I understand you sell support / hosted package. If you say you can't support a demo install, that would send a wrong message.
Not offering the demo may be a problem for tourists who aren't seriously considering this, but probably not for parties that are in the process of looking for something like this for a real use case.
Thats kinda what I’m used to seeing anyway :)
Fwiw, in the Getting Started I noticed "Our Philosophy". I'd move that to the home page. It's essential context (imho). Otherwise the home page seems too featured focus and too lite on benefits. I read that bullet list in Philosophy as benefits (in a way). That is when I sat up.
Why should _I_ care?
The philosophy at least spoke to me as opposed to features being about you.
You are, as you should be, in love with your product (read: a collection of features). You know the nooks & crannies.
Moi? I don't care. I'm selfish. We all are. I need to know what you are going to do for _me_. What pains of mine are you going to fix? Benefits is short for: Use our product and we'll make these pain - X, Y, and Z - disappear.
Make me believe in your magic :)