What Netlify got wrong

I love Netlify. Netlify have helped me save thousands of minutes during my career. Previously I'd been using huge virtual machines and then complicated AWS S3 to host my frontend sites. But when I met Netlify it was intense love. We saw each other every day and every minute. Netlify's only focus was my prosperity.

But then came a day. She was coming home with a big bloat of stuff; AWS Lambda, Forms, Identity, plugins, etc. A bunch of features that I didn't need at all. And then I started to run into different bugs/problems in the build environment. I took a few steps back and saw that Netlify never was the perfect one.

With a bit perspective it seems clear that Netlify's main purpose isn't frontend hosting, but instead to be a service minded problem solver for website builders. As a software company you can choose to either do one thing well or everything okay, and I think Netlify is the latter. And that's fine, many people want it that way, just look at AWS.

But my requirements are quite different, I want it simple and easy:

• Be able to run jobs before and after deployment.
• Build environment should only be configured once.
• Possibility to easy rollback the release if the e2e test failed.
• The whole CD process should be monitored from the CI environment.

And to find that I have to search further. Thanks for everything, Netlify.