[CedarMills]

I really like your demo.

A question that always comes up when I see these "Heroku-like" replacements on top of AWS/GCP/Azure is who is the target user?

A couple years ago, you would have platform teams helping developers launch their stuff. Since then, AWS has tried to make things easier through services like App Runner. Nowadays, if you don't want to manage the instances yourself, you just use a managed service. Platform teams are essentially dead.

It's not 2016 anymore and developers should know how their code runs. Trying to "protect" them from infrastructure only hinders their pace long term.

[igorzij]

Thank you!! And fair point. To us it's in a sense a bet on a particular direction the industry is going to take. If we're right then infrastructure-as-code isn't going away, someone needs to write it, even for the managed services. Those still need to be connected with each other, there are VPCs, security groups, secrets - the "glue" connecting those services. We don't believe developers should care about that though. Specialisation tends to increase, not decrease with time. It's hard enough to make one's frontend or backend work in isolation. So our thinking is that the devops corner of the industry is very much a transitory state - post-problem but pre-product, somewhat like hardware was before the PC, or software development before operating systems. There are strong incentives to cleanly decouple devops from development by means of products - just like operating system engineering is decoupled from software engineering via layers upon layers of apis and tools that don't require any specialist intervention.

So we are trying to make progress in that direction - if managed cloud services were hardware, then we are building an operating system for developers to use that hardware with as little friction as possible.

[no_wizard]

when you say platform teams are dead, do you just mean the part of the team that mangages platform infrastructure?

My understanding with Platform teams is that its more than DevOps, its that a core set of engineers building a platform that the rest of engineering can safely (using that word in a relative sense here) build upon, e.g., I may as part of a platform team create core API services that are then exposed to product side teams to develop against, and we work with each other. This is essentially a productivity feature, because it allows for specialists to collaborate over their expertise, as opposed to having lots of full stack generalists managing their own slices of codebases, which results in shipping faster and higher quality product.

[xyzzy123]

This only works if everyone does "you build it you run it".

It also impacts team sizing and the minimum number of people required to continuously support every project so it can be kept alive.

If you have a centralised ops / support function then they need things to be standardised so that they can support them.