Marketing brief
Manage your servers with Git.
We let developers manage their servers using simple tools they are familiar with: Git and YAML.
Add a simple YAML description of your server, git commit, git push and voila. Need to automate things up: adding database backups, continuous deployment, autoscaling or testing is just as easy.
We want to be to DevOps what GitHub is to the development community.
2 crowds, 2 points of view, 2 polarized solutions:
| Name | Examples | Description | Advantage | Issues |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| NoOps | PaaS (Heroku, dotCloud, AppFog), CI & CD (CircleCI, TravisCI, Wercker) | Developers' answers; abstract away all infrastructure concerns. | Low barriers of entries, user-friendly | Fragmented, rigid/limited, expensive, black-box/not reusable/shareable. |
| Tools | Configuration management (Chef, Puppet, Ansible), CI & CD (Capistrano, Fabric, Jenkins) | Ops' answer: build better tools to help professionals scale themselves. | Powerful/flexible, strong OSS, transparent | High barriers of entries, not portable, silo-ed/fragmented, not user-friendly |
These two polarized views are still leaving a huge, unaddressed segment of the market/needs in the middle, focusing on the fringes (large community of developers with small $$$/complexity OR few enterprise clients with lots of $$$/complexity).
Our end goal is aligned with the DevOps movement, we intend to bridge that gap. The first step towards this is lowering the barriers of entries to Ops.
- Low barriers of entries (low hanging fruits): developers can use what they already know; YAML + Git and you're done.
- Collaboration (long term goal): among professionals within an organization (ops & devs) but also across teams and organizations (OSS infrastructure).
We will win for several reasons:
- Flexibility and costs; we are providing the right balance of customization/power and cost effectiveness.
- Satisfying to both camps; we're letting developers build and manage infrastructure, while following the best practices and transparency that ops need.
- Build on collaboration/social; the ability to easily share with your team members, but also the rest of the dev/ops community your infrastructure blueprint (CI, CD, backup and revert strategies, autoscaling) will fuel itself.
Massive.
There is still no clear winner in this space; it is clearly, still as of today, a greatly underserved market. If you get started with development, there is a plethora of very good options (GitHub, Bitbucket...). Not if you're going for managing servers.
There is humongous amount of people with lots of problems and nowhere to throw their money at.
Developers! Developers! Developers!
We're building devo.ps first and foremost for developers. Developers from small teams, freelancers, developers at larger more established companies (Airbnb, Apple, GitHub).
We built that for us in the first place. We've worked at any level you could think of (from small NGO static websites, all the way up to Big Data and business intelligence for Apple or electoral systems for the government). Despite our expertise, we felt frustrated when dealing with infrastructure. We go tired of waiting for somebody to address our needs.
We know people want it:
- We're the targeted audience (we're nerds) and we need it.
- We've talked to folks at large established companies (Apple, GitHub, Airbnb, Twitter, ...),
- We talked to smaller startups (Keen.io, Lever, IFTTT)
- We talked to industry leaders (Docker, Heroku, Opscode, DataDog, PagerDuty)
- We talked to indivudals, knwown (Substack, Maxogden, Rauchg, Spike Brehm, Gwoo, ...) and unknown.
- We've tested the waters for a while with some of them and have built an audience of several thousands people waiting for us to ship devo.ps.
We know our space inside out and we are genuinely excited (and equally scared) by the opportunity.
| Name | Responsibility | Credentials |
|---|---|---|
| Vincent Viallet | Ops | Built CNC (500Startups) ops team in China, servicing hundreds of customers. Expert in security, infrastructure and related development. Worked with Paypal, Ferrari, CNN... |
| Juha Suomalainen | Development | Expert in Java, Python, Javascript. Worked at a large telco before it got acquired (Airwide Solutions, acquired by Mavenir Systems). |
| Ronan Berder | Product, Business & Strategy | Full stack, strong UX/UI chops and experienced with business. Founded Wiredcraft, a consultancy started in Shanghai that built software for governments, the UN, Apple and many other well known organizations. |
We not only have complementary profiles, we all overlap enough to understand each others work and help out.
Trust.
We can't go down, we can't get hacked.
We've manage to overcome an enormous bias towards our previous business venture (Wiredcraft, based out of China), working with Apple on some of their most sensitive data (manufacturing), building the Southern Sudan Referendum voting infrastructure and spearheading many Open Data initiatives at the World Bank.
We're in talks with GitHub to have them resell our own products (based on their own software).
We're official partners of Docker.
We'll make things happen.
- Polish & Release; we're almost through the beta testing phase (still working on variables). Unlike our other products (Octokan, Chato.ps), there are strong expectations for devo.ps once it's release (trust).
- Virtualization & Containerization; there are many other things we could branch in, but we feel we'd better be off integrating existing solutions (we've talked to GitHub, DataDog, Codeship.io...). But we're planning on building Nest since we're in a strategic place to do so and that it would drastically improves the developer experience.
- Storage, clusters, monitoring; add the ability to deal more easily with persistence and more complex structures (clusters) as well as integrating our monitoring in the system (triggers, graphs etc).
We are thinking of recruiting a security expert as well as a R&D engineer (to build some of the more long term technology, like our own distributed configuration management software).
- Primary: DevOps, Cloud, Infrastructure, Servers, Automation, Deployment, Configuration Management, Orchestration
- Secondary: PaaS, IaaS, System administration, Performance & Scalability