Plane vs. Jamsocket
Drifting in Space Corp. (opens in a new tab) is the company behind both Plane and Jamsocket (opens in a new tab).
Jamsocket is a managed platform for session backends, built on Plane. Jamsocket is a proprietary commercial product, while Plane is MIT-licensed open source.
Jamsocket’s goal is to be to Plane akin to what GitHub is to Git: a commercial managed service for using the underlying open-source code effectively in production.
Plane is narrowly scoped to concerns directly relating to the lifecycle of backends, leaving decisions like how new code gets deployed up to the user. Jamsocket is a more prescriptive, full-service platform that also integrates deployment, monitoring, and other concerns.
Things that are within Plane’s scope:
- Receiving “connect requests” for session backends from clients.
- Managing the entire lifecycle of session backends, from startup to shutdown.
- Routing HTTP traffic to session backends.
- Providing status information about backends via an API.
Things that are out of scope for Plane, but within the scope of Jamsocket, include:
- A web-based dashboard for managing backends.
- An integrated container registry for deploying new backend code.
- Session backend observability tools.
- Managing access to deploying code and generating API keys within an organization.
- Developer tools for working with session backends.
- Auto-scaling backends on on-demand cloud machines.
- Configuration of cloud network infrastructure for Plane clusters.
- Hardening drone networking and kernel surface areas for untrusted code execution.
We intend for the API surface of Jamsocket that your application interacts with to remain as close to possible as that of Plane. This way, an application built on Jamsocket can be run on a self-hosted Plane cluster, and vice versa.