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by netmute 5155 days ago
This literally sounds too good to be true.

I found no contact or company information on their website, except 2 email adresses. I can't verify if this is just a clever way of mass deploying a stealth botnet or something.

Will you trust them?
2 comments
aaronbrethorst 5155 days ago
It looks like it's a good UI on top of Opscode's Chef platform. You choose your Chef recipes and run a script that downloads the Chef client and starts installing recipes.

So, it doesn't seem to be too good to be true, at least to me. My guess is that this is an MVP for a product designed to put a non-awful UI on top of Chef (Opscode's SaaS product is, imho, borderline unusable).

That said, there is a high bar here for trust, no doubt about it.

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fpp 5154 days ago
Guess letting someone 3rd party install your server / compile your server from source requires a bit more than trust. IMHO this will be the key problem for professional /paying users. Those who would just use e.g. an AMI from a repository will certainly have no problem with that.

If you find a way to generate install scripts that can be inspected before those are run or the service is providing the scripts to be run from a local Chef server that might be an interesting approach.

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lnguyen 5155 days ago
FYI the recipes are all custom written. The community ones are aren't very standardized and usually are only good for installing from distribution packages.

(And if you look through the install output, you'll also see where they get stored on your server if you want to review anything that's being done.)

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aaronbrethorst 5155 days ago
So I see. Again, this is very cool. I hope you are planning on turning this into a commercial product.
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lnguyen 5155 days ago
We're definitely looking into the right way to turn this into a commercial product...
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lnguyen 5155 days ago
It's true. And I'm not running a stealth botnet or anything.

I'm just better at building things than trying to write marketing collateral.

Feel free to email me directly at long at rayburst.com

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netmute 5155 days ago
No offense here, I think what you did is awesome. But _some_ information about who build the site would be nice, on the site.
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lnguyen 5155 days ago
None taken... I've added some info about me on https://rayburst.com/company

Here's what it says:

"Long Nguyen has nearly 10 years experience as an enterprise build and software configuration management consultant and remembers having to install his first Linux server from floppy images that were downloaded using a 14.4K modem in his Harvard dorm.

Long has a PhD in Physics from The University of Chicago and got a crash course in the world of startups as part of the YC W08 session."

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