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

About this episode

Anurag Goel discusses the complexities of building a cloud platform like Render, including technical challenges and the impact of AI on platform adoption.

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…

People in this episode

Host: Kris Jenkins

Guest: Anurag Goel

Topics covered

• cloud platforms
• infrastructure
• technical challenges
• enterprise-grade services
• AI impact
• developer experience

Keywords

• cloud platform
• infrastructure
• Heroku
• Postgres
• AI
• developer tools
• service discovery
• high availability

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: Render, Heroku

Products: Postgres

More episodes of Developer Voices

• What's Worth Knowing In AI Right Now? (with Henry Garner) · March 26, 2026 · 1h 40m
• Asciinema: Terminal Recording Done Right (with Marcin Kulik) · February 19, 2026 · 1h 27m
• Building the SpacetimeDB Database, Game-First (with Tyler Cloutier) · February 4, 2026 · 1h 41m
• Will Turso Be The Better SQLite? (with Glauber Costa) · December 11, 2025 · 1h 51m
• Can Google's ADK Replace LangChain and MCP? (with Christina Lin) · November 20, 2025 · 1h 5m
• Building Observable Systems with eBPF and Linux (with Mohammed Aboullaite) · October 31, 2025 · 1h 11m