Heya friend!

Carl here. You signed up to receive updates about Ymir, the WordPress serverless DevOps platform that I’m building.

INTRO

It's been a busy October for me on the consulting front. Lots of contracts and I have some new ones starting next month as well. I wish I had some time to dedicate to Ymir, but I have to prioritize that work. Especially since 2024 was a slower year for me and Ymir's business shrunk.

I figured this was a good time to do some writing on the current WP Engine/Automattic situation. The writeup will just focus on what I'm thinking related to Ymir itself. I'll leave my personal take for my year in review.

For the business, things were stable. So nothing much to say on that front.

ON YMIR AND WORDPRESS

When I started working on Ymir, I was already worried about depending too much on WordPress. That said, you always hear to about niching your business at first. I thought at the time (and still think) that was good advice.

WordPress made sense as a niche because I had a newsletter, lots of business connections, and domain knowledge. That said, with hindsight now, WordPress wasn't necessarily the right niche for Ymir. This is obvious if we look at my business struggles! 😅

But that's why Ymir was never "serverless WP" or something like that. I always envisioned it more as a serverless PHP application platform. The way I designed the runtime makes it easy to add new PHP application types. (Also why Ymir launched with Bedrock support.) There's probably some work on the Laravel side to make this easier, but the foundation is there.

It's always worth thinking about platform risk when starting a product. Ymir will probably never integrate with another cloud provider besides AWS. That's a risk. A few people have asked me, “What if AWS built something like Ymir?” You never know if that could happen, but I think there are juicier targets (like Vercel) to go for.

Not that I think AWS would do that! Much like what's happening with WordPress, I think the repercussions of doing something like that would do more harm than good to their business. That said, you never know what someone might do for short-term gains.

Anyhow, this isn't about the platform risk of Ymir and AWS, but the platform risks of Ymir and WordPress. Because I want Ymir to be a serverless PHP application platform, it's quite isolated from WordPress and Automattic. There's no plugin on the .org repository to take over. You already can't do plugin updates directly from the dashboard, so there's nothing to block there either.

The only thing I see is Matt could trademark "Serverless WordPress" like he's trying to do with "Managed WordPress". However, I'm still not sure if those trademarks will be approved. If they are, this might cause more legal battles since every hosting company uses that phrase now.

So all in all, I don't feel Ymir is in any sort of weird spot. What this situation makes me want to do is accelerate my timeline to diversify beyond WordPress. This is something I'm already working on slowly.

I'm already trying to find agencies that do Drupal so we can try to host Drupal on Ymir. I'm also looking at Statamic. It's a Laravel product which puts me close to Laravel Vapor and Taylor which is a bit scary. But when I looked, it didn't look like there wasn't any official support for Statamic on Vapor. Only a few old blog posts.

So those are my thoughts on the situation as it stands with Ymir. I’m sure there will be more as things develop. Also, where I’m at regarding WordPress is also another topic entirely.

Carl