Koyeb has evolved quite a lot since I first covered the startup. The company is still focused on serverless infrastructure. But it now offers a general purpose serverless platform that you can configure through a simple ‘git push’ command, or using Docker containers.
The company’s serverless platform is now available as a public preview with a free tier to get started and try out the service — the free tier lets you run two nano apps on the platform. It has already been tested by 10,000 developers during the private beta phase. There are currently 3,000 applications running on Koyeb’s infrastructure.
Koyeb wants to abstract your server infrastructure as much as possible so that you can focus on development instead of system administration. You can use it to host a web app, an API or event-driven workloads.
Behind the scenes, the startup doesn’t use Kubernetes. Instead, it has built its own custom stack based on Firecracker microVMs, Nomad and Kuma. It runs on bare-metal servers with recent Intel and AMD chips.
There are two ways to deploy your apps to Koyeb. You can deploy from your git repository (currently limited to GitHub repositories) or from any public or private container registry. Koyeb has a web interface but also offers a command-line interface and an API.
When you deploy a new app, Koyeb gives your app a ‘.koyeb.app’ subdomain and automatically secures the app with TLS. You can also configure your own domain name.
If you need more resources, you can easily scale your app from a slider. In that case, Koyeb launches your app on several new instances and traffic is automatically load-balanced between those instances.
All of this is transparent for the development team. Every time there’s a new git commit, Koyeb automatically starts building and deploying your app.
Koyeb plans to offer a global edge network. The service is currently live in one core location in Paris and 250 edge locations for native load-balancing, TLS encryption and CDN-like caching. By the end of the year, your app will be simultaneously deployed to 10 core locations around the world.
It’s clear that Koyeb is still a work in progress. But it sounds like a promising start for lean development teams who don’t want to spend too much time on managing a cloud infrastructure.
