Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by doctorpangloss 1023 days ago
Is there ever going to be another Dropbox?

B2C for developers is really something. Some junior in some huge org, is he going to put his AWS security credentials into a box and expense the $100 a month? Maybe.

It seems really against trend. You're making something for ultra-junior developers who are going to be asking ChatGPT (or whatever soon-to-be vendor LLM) for a solution, which can't interact with UIs. And how is your thing going to have more representation in a dataset than a docker compose file or whatever hackneyed idea is simple enough for this user to adopt?

> We offer many features that are hard to build in-house

I am just saying you should try asking ChatGPT with GPT4 for examples before you make this the premise. What was once super arcane is now just another blob of opaque bullshit Berkeley CS '23 is going to be copying and pasting into somewhere.

2 comments

Thanks for the feedback!

I do think that AI is going to have a massive impact on development including cloud infrastructure; however, we rarely see junior developers setting up cloud infrastructure because it is dangerous.

Our motivation is to make the cloud easier for all skill levels. In many organizations, this usually requires platform engineers or lead engineers that determine what works best with their technical strategy.

Our goal is to (yes, remove the arcaneness), but also remove the tedium and distraction from development.

> we rarely see junior developers setting up cloud infrastructure because it is dangerous.

So whom is this for?

Doesn’t this set up cloud infrastructure? Dangerous how exactly?

It’s not a tautology. Someone who can’t handle like, using AWS directly, is a junior developer.

Another perspective is the founderese is not very reassuring.

Sorry for the confusion. It's dangerous for junior developers to interact directly with cloud providers. Our motivation is to provide guard rails for developers of all skill levels to build and run their infrastructure without exposing their organization to risk.

Here are some dangers we've seen from our customers: - Misconfigurations that result in no backups, disabled encryption, etc. - Resources accidentally configured with Internet access - Exposing internal secrets or credentials in source code - Misconfiguration of IaC that results in destruction of databases

I'm not claiming that we have eliminated these dangers. Instead, our goal is to provide a platform for software teams to codify their security and compliance practices so that all developers on their team can avoid these dangers.

More senior folks can be specialized in other things, and be less than great at infrastructure code. I think I can hold my own when it comes to Terraform, but that doesn't mean I don't have to fight with IAM for longer than I care for, on the regular.
I think you give ChatGPT too much credit. Sure, it'll give you a great algorithm in general languages, but in my experience it's still really bad with IaC for anything non-trivial.