Show HN: Encore – Type-safe back end framework that generates infra from code
11 comments
·November 14, 2025danielstocks
Happy Encore customer here! I’m kind of surprised they haven’t gotten more attention. It’s like the DX of Vercel for backend and infra, but open source and you can connect it to your existing cloud provider (we use GCP, but also works with AWS). We rarely have to think about about infra or CI/CD things. It just works, and on the rare occasion it doesn’t the team has been super quick to resolve it.
It’s like having a in-house 24/7 dev ops infra team but for a fraction of the cost!
Disclaimer: Our infrastructure needs are not super complex: Web services, SQL, key-value store, pub-sub and few other parts, your mileage may vary depending on your needs.
phpnode
Curious about how this compares to alchemy - https://alchemy.run/
wolando
Part of the selling point of terraform is that I can easily switch clouds if I need to. That's only partially true, most of your terraform would need to change to move from e.g. AWS to GCP, but still, your (hard-fought) experience with terraform on one platform will help when moving to another. If I define my infra the encore way, will I be locked in to one cloud, or can I easily migrate if I need to? Furthermore, I only see Go and Typescript, do you have a roadmap for supporting more languages?
andout_
Good question! With Encore, your application code is actually more portable than with Terraform because you are defining infrastructure semantically (eg. "I need a Postgres database"), not with cloud-specific config. The same code deploys to AWS, GCP, or even locally with Docker so no Terraform rewrite is needed when switching clouds.
As for the language support; we support Go and TypeScript today. We're focusing on making these rock-solid first, but more languages are on the roadmap. Python is the likely next candidate.
fulafel
How does it compare with SST?
rubenvanwyk
Have been watching Encore for a while, excited about prospects of it in other languages like Python!
thecupisblue
9x faster than express is a bold claim, would be interesting to see how it holds up with real application logic and some real benchmarks/usecases.
andout_
That's for request handling overhead. Real-world speedup depends on your bottleneck (DB, external APIs, etc.), but the gains still apply. Good feedback though, and we have more benchmarks planned regardless.
stmblast
the type-safe infrastructure primitives are interesting, curious how it compares to something like effect or nestjs for actual production use
andout_
Different scope. NestJS organizes app code, Effect does functional composition - both still need separate infra tooling. Encore handles services + infrastructure + deployment as one thing. You could use Effect/NestJS patterns inside Encore apps though. Happy to answer specifics!
How does Encore handle the following scenarios?
1. I want to deploy to a testing environment where I may want to use different users, different sized services, or even mock services so I don't have to pay for them? 2. I want to develop in an isolated environment (maybe without internet or simply I'm trying to develop a narrow feature that doesn't require the rest of the infrastructure)? 3. How does it handle security elements like VPCs, IAM roles, all these things that are the context my application runs in that I don't necessarily want to couple to my application code?