Why we became Analog's deployment partner..

You can read Brandon's short and sweet announcement here. As for my side, as a co-founder and developer of Zerops, I would like to take this opportunity to recap my history with Angular, how Brandon and others in the Angular community helped shape my career and, by extension, Zerops. Finally, I'll share how I hope this partnership will help the ecosystem, because as Brandon put it:

We've long stated that when finding a partnership, we wanted someone willing to continue to invest in Angular and its ecosystem of OSS projects
Brandon Roberts, Analog

I started using AngularJS in 2013 and immediately fell in love with it. At Costlocker, it allowed me to quickly prototype and finish interactive interfaces and complex forms. It brought order to the chaos of trying to stitch together Zend Framework-generated pages with jQuery's $.ajax. When Angular 2 came around, I was fully on board from day one. I started using it for real applications very early, back when the @View decorator was a thing and when Material components lacked even the basic form elements.

Angular 2 moved Angular forward towards components, but there was one thing that bothered me: state management. When I saw Rob Wormald talking about Redux on Angular Gitter, I was blown away by its simplicity. I was probably one of the first to check his prototype Plunkers and among the first people to try ngrx.

But it wasn't until the dynamic duo of Mike Ryan and Brandon Roberts came around and started experimenting with things like ngrx-sagas, routers, and asynchronicity in general that things really started to click. I probably rewrote my app at that time 10 times over, implementing the latest and greatest updates to the Angular and ngrx ecosystem. Needless to say, Angular, ngrx, and people like Mike, Brandon, and Rob had a big impact on my development abilities. This allowed me to build and maintain Zerops' frontend in a reasonable shape almost single-handedly, despite hundreds of iterations over the years.

In 2019, I became a frontend developer for an interesting greenfield project (from a frontend perspective). A large local hosting company, vshosting, had started working on their PaaS. The idea was to take the custom high-grade setups they were manually creating and managing for their clients with huge platforms—through a team of 50 sys/ops people from their own datacenter—and transform them into an automated platform.

I soon became the product owner of Zerops, along with being the developer and taking care of design, UX, marketing, business plans, and vision. I really took the project as my own and poured everything into it. At the same time, vshosting became part of Contabo Group, a large global hosting provider. In two years, we built the platform from the ground up and were ready to start "marketing". Unfortunately, there were conflicting ideas. While mine was based around DevRel, sponsoring open source, creating content, and the idea of "developer-first", the other side envisioned a nameless platform integrated into Contabo's offering.

The least I could do at that time was to secure $500/month funding for Brandon, who was then starting to work on Analog. At the end of 2022, just three months after the launch of the "integrated platform," the whole project was shut down, simply deemed too far outside the group's core business. Unfortunately, the sponsorship ended as well, but I told Brandon we'd be back someday, somehow!

I wasn't willing to give up. My first question after the shutdown announcement was: "Okay, so are you going to sell Zerops to us?" Fast forward to 2024, skipping a couple of insane stories about trying to raise funds in 2023 for a project with heavy baggage, and making a deal for the intellectual property, here's where we landed: The original dev team and I relaunched Zerops as an independent spin-off. Contabo stayed on as a strategic partner for infrastructure, and Presto Ventures and Gi21 provided us with pre-seed investment to show that Zerops has its place in the market and that the DevRel strategy works.

Zerops is stable, used for production projects by our loyal users from back in the day as well as others we've met along the way while trying to re-launch the project. But I will admit it lacks some polish. We cannot yet go toe-to-toe with other PaaS providers funded by tens to hundreds of millions of dollars with large teams when it comes to documentation, onboarding, knowledge base, and reach. We'll get there soon, but for now, we are looking for enthusiasts who will find our vision of the ideal mix of developer experience, affordability, flexibility, and scalability interesting enough to give Zerops a try and watch our journey.

So, as part of my "genius" DevRel strategy, I decided to put a major part of our budget into sponsoring Analog (and possibly spartan). It's a full-stack framework where Zerops is not even the best natural match — while Zerops works great for small SSR/SSG websites, it thrives the most with more complex infrastructure. So hear me out on why I'm betting on Analog.

People sleep on Angular, but it's been making strides with DX features recently, and the vision is even brighter as it starts sharing more things with Wiz. While Next.js is absolutely crushing it, Analog has the potential to be the alternative. Angular is still perceived as a heavy SPA framework for corporate apps, but the reality is now different (and you should check Joshua Morony to see how different).

At Zerops, I try deploying different open-source projects all the time, and what I've noticed is that almost every popular software, like Strapi (one of the most popular headless CMS) or Medusa.js (an incredible open-source e-commerce ecosystem), provides their official examples in Next.js, usually paired with Tailwind and shadcn for UI. This is what I believe most people end up using because you can just fork it and go - everything is ready for implementing your use case.

So my idea is to put together a team, composed of Analog (the full-stack framework), spartan/ui (the unstyled primitives UI framework), and spartan/stack (the opinionated stack built on Analog), and hopefully others, to start creating alternatives to these official Next.js examples. The goal is to show how the Angular ecosystem compares to Next.js on popular, modern, open-source use cases, to build bridges between users of these technologies, and to push Analog and spartan forward.

How does Zerops fit in? As a completely optional part - a one-click deploy of a production-ready setup including Analog + the open-source technology, but with absolutely no vendor lock-in. Want to use Vercel to host your Analog app and use managed cloud versions of the given software? You're absolutely free to do so; it will work the same. At the same time, I hope this will allow Zerops to attract the early adopters we need from my only "home turf" dev community, which is Angular. And I'll make sure to give back to the community.

🎉🎉🎉🎉

To make running Analog sites on Zerops even more affordable, we'll be soon introducting a "core light" for ~third of the current project core cost ($5/month).

And to celebrate the start of our partnership, we offer additional $50 of free credits on top of the $65 base (after account verification). To claim your Analog bonus, simply email us at dev@zerops.io after verifying your account.

Aleš
Co-founder, CEO, Developer

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