Net Dev: like nanobox?

Dev. sounds a lot like nanobox just without being able to choose our own provider to host on, or will we?

hi @MentalGear - i am moving this post to the #netlify-dev category as it fits better there :slight_smile:

Hey @MentalGear! I work on the Support team at Netlify, so take my response with an obvious grain of salt that I am a product expert on our offerings, and I’ve never used nanobox before. A quick peek at their feature listing on their website makes me think it has a much different goal. Theirs seems to be a full deployment strategy for production apps? I might be wrong but I’ll rely on you to enhance my understanding in that case :slight_smile:

Netlify Dev on the other hand is a way to test and live-share your in-progress work using all of the tooling you’ll use to deploy to netlify - things like redirects and lambda functions which our platform provides seamlessly in production that are hard to test without deploying today.

Hey chris, thanks for your reply!

Nanobox actually also offers a fully simulated server env on local so one could test out code as if it was running on the deployed servers.

However, as the tool is a paid service, they allow you to deploy anywhere afterwards, and I’m wondering if one can also deploy code developed with your solution anywhere afterwards?

Cheers!

Hi @MentalGear,

Netlify Functions is build on top of AWS Lambda (more documentation here).

There is nothing to prevent anyone from using Lambda directly and the code should be portable. It may be that different services (besides AWS Lambda) have nuances which require code modification (or not).

We hope that our continuous deployment features make us the service of choice for many people but enabling deployment to any “lambda type” service provider isn’t currently part of our core design philosophy. In other words, Netlify isn’t trying to create the same service type of that nanobox is so we don’t officially support other lambda function providers (but I would expect code to be portable anyway).

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That (“additional lambda providers”) is also an open feature request, to which I’ve added your contact info so we can let you know if our service changes. As Luke implied, we don’t have that plan at present, though the facility was definitely designed with that eventual use case in mind, so it is something we’ve been thinking about at least :slight_smile:

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Great, thanks for taking the time to answer both of you !

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