let us know if you need any help moving out docs, websites or any other web property from there, we'll be super happy to help. Projects like Kubernetes, Docker and React are already using our free offering for Open Source.
You're right, everything that the CMS does currently could also be done with raw Git messages. The CMS is designed to have pluggable backends. We had an early version working with Git directly. We decided to focus in one backend at a time rather than having several half integrated because the core features were evolving too fast to support several backends initially.
We plan on support raw Git in the future again. It's a matter of making sure it's useful for more people other than developers that already know how to use Git.
I agree with you, $10 in AWS fees sounds like a lot of traffic. That's also why Netlify has a free tier. We leave paid plans for people with more traffic. We event have a redundant DNS service for people that really really need it. For your needs is completely free of charge and hassle :)
Netlify Pages is our free tier that offers a few things that GitLab Pages doesn't offer. For instance, we build merge requests for you and integrate them with commit statuses. So you get a real development workflow for your websites.
CloudFront is good. We use it for large assets. After managing thousands of sites, we realized that it's actually a hassle to manage cache invalidation yourself.
We work with several cloud providers to offer a better experience at the CDN level and manage caches for you. Our CDN also allows proxying end-to-end encrypted connections, so you can use it to host front-end apps and redirect requests to backend servers somewhere else.
Signup permissions is definitely something we need to work on more. We optimized them at the beginning to give people the best experience possible, but we'll definitely iterate to allow using Netlify with less permissions. We just need to find the right workflow to still keep it as simple and powerful as possible.
These are some things that you can do with our Pages tier FREE, that you cannot do with GH Pages:
- We don't restrict people to only one static site generator, like Jekyll. You have use whatever with our Continuous Deployment.
- Automatic rollbacks at the CDN level. If you push a broken site, you don't need to stress about fixing the issue, pushing again, and waiting until the changes are published again. We have a big button that says "Rollback". Clicking that, our CDN automatically purges your site and promotes the good version you want. After that, you can spend as much time as you want writing a proper fix.
- Automatic provisioning and renewals of Let's Encrypt certificates for custom domains. If you have a custom domain, we do that for you, you don't have to worry about anything.
- Free custom domains, you have to have a paid subscription with GitHub if you want to use your own domain.
As I said again, those things are FREE with our initial plan, $0.
being able to see pull requests deployed live without compromising production changed drastically the way we work as a team and we build our front-end applications. I can't wait to get other people's feedback.
Yes, the testing/deployment cycle for Enterprise is totally different. We usually release a major version with new features every two/three months, and 2 or 3 minor versions with bug fixes in between.
We always keep the version of github synchronized with master for development/testing, although we only release master directly in major releases. For minor releases we avoid to include major features from github to keep it as much stable as possible.
let us know if you need any help moving out docs, websites or any other web property from there, we'll be super happy to help. Projects like Kubernetes, Docker and React are already using our free offering for Open Source.