Oh boy, I have so many questions...
* You want to simplify infrastructure, but there's a new learning curve here. Why did you decide to go with diagramming as a solution? What other methods did you evaluate and discard?
* How does an organization with existing infrastructure implement Massdriver?
* How do you handle edge cases, custom configurations, complex logic, etc.? For example, workflows that use custom scripts or some other form of band-aid.
* The visual approach could make it too easy to piece together infrastructure without understanding the implications. How do you prevent developers from creating poorly architected systems just because you make it simple to connect components?
* When things go wrong, how do developers debug issues at the infrastructure level? Do they reach out to ops?
Congrats on the launch!
I'm not a seasoned DevOps professional but I'm usually the one who ends up provisioning or setting up VMs, serverless stuff and DBs. I just don't understand the product.
You make reusable TF modules that have security and policies baked in. Engineers use a UI to hookup those modules and Massdriver does the deployment work for you.
Sounds like a godsend for big teams but I don't see pre-funded Startups being able to afford a $500/mo fee. For funded ones that's highly approachable but their problems with their IaC wouldn't be as visible.
Honestly, in smaller teams you can get pretty far with just setting thing sup through your cloud providers web console and just focus on what your building.
Since the fee is kind of steep, what's the justification for this. Is it that the workflow improvements would significantly improve productivity which would justify the cost or is the service itself expensive to run and maintain.
As SRE/DevOps/Ops type, I took a look because I've sat with salespeople with your competitors. It looks like a functional platform and another "Cloud defaults are too scary? Here is a sane default option."
>The hard part isn’t just technical, it’s socio-technical. Ops teams want control, devs want speed, and compliance creates friction between them.
You got that right and I'm not sure another tool is going to fix it.
I wouldn't say Ops wants control, it's we want to stop being paged after hours because Devs yolo stuff into production without a care in the world. Not sure tooling will fix that.
I love your (https://www.massdriver.cloud/blogs/devops-is-bullshit) blog article though. It prompted a great discussion.
This is quite interesting.
What does a seat entail? You talk about self serve (I love it!), but would the users that self-serve take up a seat? Or are seats just for the folks creating the modules?
Having watched and participated in an online call (mentioned in another comment here), there were two big things that were strikingly cool about MassDriver:
* It turns the connections between components owned by different IaC tools/systems into _typed_ JSON. Think patch panels, where the connections are fully typed.
* Kelsey mentioned that you can introspect on the metadata in the live system using absolutely anything you want, down to just bash scripts. So it's _very_ hackable
Really interesting approach to streamlining IaC. I was wondering, have you considered a free tier or trial option (maybe limited to a few boxes or a single environment) for early-stage teams? I'd love to play with it and maybe migrate our infra next quarter.
What we've developed that is similar is a meta-layer above terraform to take high-level intent and use that to generate terraform which is then committed to git and auto-actuated.
This is nice because it's still all using git and you can continuously merge in updates as the 'best practice' definitions in the intent get updated. It allows teams to maintain their own customizations and eventually promote them to up to the intent level to capture them as a best practice so other teams can benefit from them.
Wanted to check your status page to get a feeling for stability. Is your status icon in the footer hard coded, or is there an actual status page?
Is there any way for me to submit a module or co-author one with you guys for my cloud service?
I love all of the contextual metadata, huge potential here
YOU SHOULD KNOW AVG flags the site with malvertisement, one of the api calls I think. You might wanna do a site scan to make sure.
damn thought it'd be a space launch platform
Just an FYI: If I select "Features" / "API First" on your page, I end up at a 404.
How much do you have to pay Hightower and Majors to show up on the About Us page?
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Pet peeve but I hate it when people named something lame after something much cooler. Same problem with Ansible, Raytracter etc. It feels like you're compensating for how lame the product is.
This is cool but you need to figure out how to add a free tier, for less than 5 boxes and 1 env or something like that. There’s no way we would spend this money unless we were boiled like a frog in a pot and just went with it because we didn’t want to go back.
And $500-1000/mo is way too much, that’s more than a 10 person company spends every month on their entire CRM.
By pricing yourselves so high what you’re telling people is hey we’re a startup and we don't expect to scale big, and what I’m thinking is hey maybe this is risky having our critical infra tied up with this startup.