Backplane is shutting down

I&#x27;ve been bitten by service shut downs like this and over the years, here is the &quot;rulebook&quot; I&#x27;ve made for myself to reduce the risk:<p>- Don&#x27;t use products from startups with unknown, dubious business models that are clearly subsidised by VC money until they &quot;figure out how to monetize&quot;. (recently I saw a company saying &quot;our business model is still firming up, whatever that means).<p>- Open source doesn&#x27;t mean it&#x27;s safe. Very few open source companies have solid business models and if the vast majority of the contrinbutors to the project come from the same company, then if they go down or get aquihired reviving the project and its community is not always guaranteed or simple. OSS projects need major adoption to be safe from this sort of damage.<p>- I sometimes even research the VCs backing the founders as well. I have seen companies founded by associates in VC firms leaving the firm to start a company because they know 1. they can get funding from their old pals in the firm, 2. they are going to be selling the company quickly to X because of some insider information about X&#x27;s need or an internal project to find a company to buy in the space. Some founders are serial &quot;build and flip&quot;ers and I avoid using their products.<p>I feel much safer buying crtical services from a bootstrapped and profitable startup than a well funded one that doesn&#x27;t have a clear business model.

Wow. If I were a user, I&#x27;d hate to have this dropped on me today. Christmas eve is in 10 days and your traffic is about to stop routing in 15 days.

Cases like this make me always think <i>very</i> hard before admitting a closed-source &#x2F; SaaS solution into the critical path of my stack.<p>In this regard, large established players have the benefit of the doubt when using a proprietary SaaS service: they are unlikely to fold, and if they sunset a product, they will likely give ample warning well ahead of time. (But not always even so: I see any new Google consumer product as a &quot;while supplies last&quot; sale.)

Two week notice during the holiday season seems pretty sudden and painful for users. I feel bad for those who now have to scramble and probably miss time with their families as a result.

At KickoffLabs we used them to handle a bunch of routing on behalf of our hosted customers.<p>The timing was less than ideal for sure.<p>However they arranged a good support system with the folks at Fly.io. We’ve already transitioned new customers to it and they are helping to migrate existing sites and certs next week.<p>I think it’s a risk you just have to take, but we learned a lesson that for things that are dependancies for your business it’s good to have a couple of alternatives lined up or working side by side. :)

I like the basic technical idea behind Backplane, which is that your backend servers &quot;dial-out&quot; and connect to the edge load balancers. Does anyone know why this technique is not used more? Or is it actually common but I just haven&#x27;t heard of it? If so who&#x2F;where is it actually done this way?

2 year old seed round company with &lt;10 employees. I don&#x27;t imagine they have a whole lot of customers, and hopefully no customers that rely solely on them.

I understand not wanting to appear on &quot;our incredible journey&quot; blog or whatever with a bunch of sap, but surely more information can be made public without everyone emailing? Why shutting down? Why only a couple of weeks? Will the code be open sourced?

What is Backplane? Why is it shutting down?

Not to be confused with Backblaze, in case anybody else made that mistake.

“Backplane” refers to the rear interior surface of an equipment cabinet, where there’s often a maze of electrical conductors for routing power&#x2F;data around the various rack units or cards it can hold. Examples include blade servers, very serious routers, and theatrical lighting dimmer racks.<p>The system can be expanded and serviced (without interruption) by installing and removing modules, but the backplane is forever.<p>A hot SaaS startup purporting to be your backplane is about as backwards as it gets. Smart companies are using cloud services in exactly the opposite way: as temporary, interchangeable capacity slotted into a backplane <i>they</i> own.

They couldn&#x27;t wait till after new years to do this?

If, like me, you asked &quot;what is backplane?&quot; Here you go: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.crunchbase.com&#x2F;organization&#x2F;backplane" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.crunchbase.com&#x2F;organization&#x2F;backplane</a>

so i&#x27;m curious then...<p>considering that this is displayed on the CNCF interactive landscape page, does it mean that backplane will be quickly removed from the service proxy group, or does anyone think that CNCF is already aware? i reaalize it&#x27;s not backed project or anything, but it clearly made it there somehow. considering how hot CNCF is right now, made even more apparent by the 8K+ sized crowd this week, i would imagine that the CNCF website brings a nice bit of traffic to these small companies.<p>it&#x27;s too bad...backplane&#x27;s vision seemed promising albeit lofty, and against some heavy odds (with some big players in the space).

Is this the same company that at one point was making social networks for celebrities?<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;techcrunch.com&#x2F;2013&#x2F;02&#x2F;03&#x2F;backplane&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;techcrunch.com&#x2F;2013&#x2F;02&#x2F;03&#x2F;backplane&#x2F;</a>

I&#x27;m neither an employee nor a customer, just someone who was following the project on twitter because it looked very intriguing. I just want to say that the comments on this thread are absolutely ridiculous and I expected better. Does anyone actually think the customers would find out at the last minute? That the company would leave its users without any support? It&#x27;s baseless speculation and my guess is it&#x27;s totally wrong. - The company is founded by Blake Mizerany <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;bmizerany?lang=en" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;bmizerany?lang=en</a> an engineer known for Sinatra and a bunch of other well respected projects. - The users adopting an early stage startup&#x27;s product are likely friends&#x2F;former colleagues who are putting personal trust into the team. Does anyone really think nobody got a heads up, or possible support deals while they migrate?<p>Second, Backplane really looked like great tech <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=43wFJBRTHG0" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=43wFJBRTHG0</a>