I love all of the contextual metadata, huge potential here
Launch HN: Massdriver (YC W22) – Self-serve cloud infra without the red tape
41–50 of 61 posts
Re: Launch HN: Massdriver (YC W22) – Self-serve cloud infra without the red tape
#42Having watched and participated in an online call (mentioned in another comment here), there were two big things that were strikingly cool about MassDriver: * It turns the connections between components owned by different IaC tools/systems into _typed_ JSON. Think patch panels, where the connections are fully typed. * Kelsey mentioned that you can introspect on the metadata in the live system using absolutely anythin…
Hey! How's it been? I followed you on bsky a few days ago! Glad you liked it! Yeah, the typed connections are a big part of what makes Massdriver powerful. It makes sure infrastructure components integrate right without devs having to worry about all the low-level details. We're expanding the graph metadata with a querying system coming out of alpha soon that lets you ask stuff like "Where are all my t3 instances in…
Isn’t that something you’d easily get out of any IaC tooling dashboard?
I’ll admit a graph query makes it easier, but the information is there.
Re: Launch HN: Massdriver (YC W22) – Self-serve cloud infra without the red tape
#43This is cool but you need to figure out how to add a free tier, for less than 5 boxes and 1 env or something like that. There’s no way we would spend this money unless we were boiled like a frog in a pot and just went with it because we didn’t want to go back.
And $500-1000/mo is way too much, that’s more than a 10 person company spends every month on their entire CRM.
By pricing yourselves so high what you’re telling people is hey we’re a startup and we don't expect to scale big, and what I’m thinking is hey maybe this is risky having our critical infra tied up with this startup.
Re: Launch HN: Massdriver (YC W22) – Self-serve cloud infra without the red tape
#44Pet peeve but I hate it when people named something lame after something much cooler. Same problem with Ansible, Raytracter etc. It feels like you're compensating for how lame the product is.
Re: Launch HN: Massdriver (YC W22) – Self-serve cloud infra without the red tape
#45As SRE/DevOps/Ops type, I took a look because I've sat with salespeople with your competitors. It looks like a functional platform and another "Cloud defaults are too scary? Here is a sane default option." >The hard part isn’t just technical, it’s socio-technical. Ops teams want control, devs want speed, and compliance creates friction between them. You got that right and I'm not sure another tool is going to fix it.…
> I wouldn't say Ops wants control, it's we want to stop being paged after hours because Devs yolo stuff into production without a care in the world. Not sure tooling will fix that. You have hit the nail on the head here. Our base hypothesis is the only way to solve this problem is to start with a self-service approach. If I deploy an RDS instance and nobody ever connects to it, it will never have an issue. The momen…
> Developers need to have ownership and accountability for their infrastructure without having to become absolute cloud experts.
This will never happen. You can’t own something you don’t understand.
Ops and Dev are different roles for a reason, and the only reason we’ve shifted away from that is to accelerate profits; yes, you can spend your way to growth, and yes, you can run massively complex systems on hardware you have never seen, nor understand. That doesn’t make it a good idea.
Re: Launch HN: Massdriver (YC W22) – Self-serve cloud infra without the red tape
#46Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I wouldn't say Ops wants control, it's we want to stop being paged after hours because Devs yolo stuff into production without a care in the world. Not sure tooling will fix that. You have hit the nail on the head here. Our base hypothesis is the only way to solve this problem is to start with a self-service approach. If I deploy an RDS instance and nobody ever connects to it, it will never have an issue. The momen…
> Developers need to have ownership and accountability for their infrastructure without having to become absolute cloud experts. This will never happen. You can’t own something you don’t understand. Ops and Dev are different roles for a reason, and the only reason we’ve shifted away from that is to accelerate profits; yes, you can spend your way to growth, and yes, you can run massively complex systems on hardware yo…
I am unsure what you are getting at. Our platform is all about Ops and Dev being separate jobs, but operating at a greater scale. Ops produce modules that can be consumed by Developers. Developers control the scale of their infra while Ops encodes security and compliance in the module. It seems like this would be the ideal model in this instance. If it is not, what does the ideal look like in your opinion?
Re: Launch HN: Massdriver (YC W22) – Self-serve cloud infra without the red tape
#47Really interesting approach to streamlining IaC. I was wondering, have you considered a free tier or trial option (maybe limited to a few boxes or a single environment) for early-stage teams? I'd love to play with it and maybe migrate our infra next quarter.
Re: Launch HN: Massdriver (YC W22) – Self-serve cloud infra without the red tape
#48Really interesting approach to streamlining IaC. I was wondering, have you considered a free tier or trial option (maybe limited to a few boxes or a single environment) for early-stage teams? I'd love to play with it and maybe migrate our infra next quarter.
We have a 2-week free trial. That can be extended for you if you need a longer POC period. We also have some deals for early-stage companies we can talk through. Book a demo with us and let's talk through your use case!
Re: Launch HN: Massdriver (YC W22) – Self-serve cloud infra without the red tape
#49Earlier quoted context omitted.
Hey! How's it been? I followed you on bsky a few days ago! Glad you liked it! Yeah, the typed connections are a big part of what makes Massdriver powerful. It makes sure infrastructure components integrate right without devs having to worry about all the low-level details. We're expanding the graph metadata with a querying system coming out of alpha soon that lets you ask stuff like "Where are all my t3 instances in…
Isn’t that something you’d easily get out of any IaC tooling dashboard? I’ll admit a graph query makes it easier, but the information is there.
There are probably some dashboards that can give you that information easily. Where having the graph is interesting is scripting something that can test changes to a widely used module. With all of your config behind an API you could pull the live config of every instance of that module, run your change against it, and then trigger a deployment of each one of the modules in isolation with the new code. The least interesting part of the API is search.
Re: Launch HN: Massdriver (YC W22) – Self-serve cloud infra without the red tape
#50Earlier quoted context omitted.
So does mass driver become a single source of truth for all information about my companies entire cloud or does it only maintain a track of what's been deployed through it. I have a friend whos a manager at a large e-commerce company who's teams entire responsibility is to oversee all matters regarding their private and public cloud usage. They also manage and maintain services for internal use. I would love to recom…
It is a single source of truth, but only what is managed through the platform. Private cloud isn't the best experience right now, its possible, but it requires our platform being able to 'get inside' so we either need a control plane exposed to us or a VPN connection in. Self-hosted is our #1 requested feature, so we are cranking away at it. Its in alpha, and we're looking for testers/feedback. Would love an intro!
When you get self-hosted up and running, you may also want to consider open sourcing the private cloud portion as well. Think of it more as a marketing thing. Many companies It's a long game, but might be worth it.