[bump64]

For the last 10 years I've been working mostly on CI and CD automation for a few projects that as part of their offering tried to automate the deployment for their clients.

In general when you try to simplify a process you increase the level of abstraction which leads to additional complexity in terms of customization and integration with third party systems and tools. Then you decide that it is a good idea to offer integration with the third party systems and tools and you increase the abstraction even more which increases the complexity even more. Also in the end you wonder if you are in the CD tools business or you are offering your core product.

It is much more productive to develop the product in mind with the tools for deployment that are already available. Unless you want to have a product and a "Services" division that configures and operates your product for the clients...

[jillesvangurp]

Agreed. You have to develop such that your product survives whatever is fashionable today in any case. As Joel Spolsky pointed out at some point, your architecture is not the framework you picked.

On the other hand, CD/CI needs to be an enabler and in small startup there is only so much time you can dedicate to it. Any change on this front tends to be disruptive and suck up non trivial amounts of development time. So keep it simple. Follow the principle of the least amount of surprise (for new team members if you hire them). And keep it reasonable. You are going to cut corners here one way or another. Don't obsess about that.

The Dark people seems to want you to buy into their entire stack (editor, language, saas platform, etc.). That sounds like a lot of risky unproven technology to me. Maybe use something more mainstream like heroku?