Northflank, a self-service developer platform, runs workloads on Kubernetes and can deploy on its managed infrastructure or a customer's own AWS, Google Cloud or Azure account.
Will says 99% of Northflank's rivals are do-it-yourself setups, and he sees that as an opening because no breakaway product exists yet.
Northflank runs untrusted user code on Kata containers after moving off gVisor, because gVisor hit performance problems and nested virtualization support varies across clouds.
Northflank bets developers will give up DIY infrastructure for one platform
Northflank is a self-service platform that lets teams deploy workloads without touching infrastructure, and it bets that the real rival is homegrown tooling rather than another product. It wins by covering nearly every task a team needs, and by letting enterprises keep their own clouds, data centres and tools. Heroku stalled and Cloud Foundry lost to Kubernetes, which leaves room for a platform built over five years.
Takeaways
Northflank sells workload management, not infrastructure management. It runs apps, databases, jobs and preview environments on Kubernetes, which users never see. Teams can use Northflank's managed infrastructure or connect their own AWS, Google Cloud or Azure accounts. Will says any container orchestrator could replace Kubernetes underneath.
Its real competitor is do-it-yourself tooling. Will says 99% of competition is DIY setups, and no breakaway product exists yet. A rival must handle nearly every task a team needs. Northflank spent five years building, with hundreds of API endpoints and customers running a thousand microservices.
Rivals Heroku and Cloud Foundry lost their footing. Will argues Heroku sold too early and stopped innovating. He says Kubernetes defeated Cloud Foundry. Northflank positions itself as the product that keeps building, serving teams with 50 platform engineers running very complex workloads.
Security drives the runtime choice, shaped by cloud limits. Untrusted user code runs in a secure runtime. Northflank launched on gVisor, then moved to Kata containers after performance problems. AWS blocks nested virtualization on standard instances, so gVisor remains there, while Azure allows it on all CPU types.
Enterprises get flexibility instead of one default stack. Istio is exposed by default but uses about 30% of cluster resources, and some customers need Linkerd. Enterprises can bring their own logging, DNS and secrets tools. Customers can also adopt only build, only deploy, or everything after commit.
Hybrid and private cloud demand is real. Will says enterprises have invested billions in data centres and will not discard them. Northflank installs on any Kubernetes endpoint, including OpenShift, Rancher and bare metal. He treats hybrid cloud as separate from multi-cloud, which usually means active-active workloads.
Pricing undercuts the incumbents. A free Developer Sandbox leads into usage-based monthly billing. Will claims Northflank is about 30 times cheaper than OpenShift on a customer's own cloud account, and about half the price of Heroku on Northflank's hardware.
How Northflank began
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On this episode 2
Show 1
Will and his cofounder met playing online games.
At age 11 they deployed game servers on Hetzner and OVH bare metal, paid for with pocket money.
After university they built a game server hosting platform on Rancher.
They later moved that platform to Mesos.
They then broadened it into the Northflank platform, which now hosts Minecraft servers among other workloads.