Building Render: Inside a Modern Cloud Platform (with Anurag Goel)

How would you build a Heroku-like platform from scratch? This week we're diving deep into the world of cloud platforms and infrastructure with Anurag Goel, founder and CEO of Render.

Starting from the seemingly simple task of hosting a web service, we quickly discover why building a production-ready platform is far more complex than it appears. Why is hosting a Postgres database so challenging? How do you handle millions of users asking for thousands of different features? And what's the secret to building infrastructure that developers actually want to use?

We explore the technical challenges of building enterprise-grade services—from implementing reliable backups and high availability to managing private networking and service discovery. Anurag shares insights on choosing between infrastructure-as-code versus configuration, why they built on Go, and how they handle 100 billion requests per month.

Plus, we discuss the impact of AI on platform adoption: Are LLMs already influencing which platforms developers choose? Will hosting platforms need to actively support agentic workflows? And what does the future hold for automated debugging?

Whether you're curious about building your own platform, want to understand what really happens behind your cloud provider's dashboard, or just enjoy hearing war stories from the infrastructure trenches, this episode has something for you.

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Render: https://render.com/

Render’s MCP Server (Early Access): https://render.com/docs/mcp-server

Pulumi: https://www.pulumi.com/

Victoria Metrics: https://victoriametrics.com

Loki: https://vector.dev/docs/reference/configuration/sinks/loki/

Vector: https://vector.dev/

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