alt Hacker NewsThis space of #2 like Lithus is not something I'm very familiar with, so thank you for the comment that piqued my interest!
If you're willing to share, I'm curious who else you would describe as being in this space.
My last decade and a half or so of experience has all been in cloud services, and prior to that it was #3 or #4. What was striking to me when I went to the Lithus website was that I couldn't figure out any details without hitting a "Schedule a Call" button. This makes it difficult for me to map my experiences in using cloud services onto what Lithus offers. Can I use terraform? How does the kubernetes offering work? How does the ML/AI data pipelines work? To me, it would be nice if I could try it out in a very limited way as self-service, or at least read some technical documentation. Without that, I'm left wondering how it works. I'm sure this is a conscious decision to not do this, and for good reasons, but I thought I'd share my impressions!
Hello! I think this is a fair question, and improving the communication on the website is something that is steadily climbing up our priority list.
We're not really that kind of product company; we're more of a services company. What we do is deploy Kubernetes clusters onto bare metal servers. That's the core technical offering. However, everything beyond that is somewhat per-client. Some clients need a lot of compute. Some clients need a custom object storage cluster. Some clients need a lot of high-speed internal networking. Which is why we prefer to have a call to figure out specifically what your needs are. But I can also see how this isn't necessarily satisfying if you're used to just grabbing the API docs and having a look around.
What we will do is take your company's software stack and migrate it off AWS/Azure/Google and deploy it onto our new infrastructure. We will then become (or work with) your DevOps team to supporting you. This can be anything from containerising workloads to diagnosing performance issues to deploying a new multi-region Postgres cluster. Whatever you need done on your hardware that we feel we can reasonably support. We are the ones on-call should NATS fall over at 4am.
Your team also has full access to the Kubernetes cluster to deploy to as you wish.
I think the pricing page is the most concrete thing on our website, and it is entirely accurate. If you were to phone us and say, "I want that exact hardware," we would do it for you. But the real value we also offer is in the DevOps support we provide, actually doing the migration up-front (at our own cost), and being there working with your team every week.