Good question. No, we don't intend to replace the CI service. We think of CI as infrastructure, and there are plenty of great infrastructure providers out there. And you are absolutely correct that for Dagger to succeed, it has to remain agnostic to infrastructure providers, which means we cannot build an infrastructure provider business ourselves. If the experience of hosting Dagger becomes so bad that it affects the developer experience, we might ship such a feature as a stopgap and even charge for it - but it is not a strategic priority. The sooner other infrastructure providers offer a fantastic hosting experience, the better. That is not where we see the biggest opportunity for Dagger.

However, there is a great opportunity to help businesses manage their software supply chain. What is running where, and how did it get there? Who is authorized to run which pipelines on which machines, and which which inputs? What is the diff between this dev environment and staging? Staging and production? Etc. Keep in mind this is not limited to your production pipeline; there are staging environments, development environments, all running pipelines all day long. It's hard to simply know everything that is going on.

Each time Dagger runs your pipeline, it can produce telemetry about every aspect of your supply chain. Git SHAs, docker image checksums and cryptographic signatures, specific versions of kubernetes and cloudformation configurations, before and after templating, test results, monitoring status... It also integrates with your secrets management backends, your developer's local source code. Basically every node in your supply chain can be a node in your DAG if you want it to. The logical next step is to give you a centralized place to send all this telemetry, and tools to extract insights from it. You could also perhaps manage the configuration of your various Dagger engines in one location.

Another product that is often requested is a visual DAG debugger. When a pipeline break, you want to know why, and staring at your CI logs is definitely not the best experience for that. With a web UI, there's a lot we can do there.

The business opportunity boils down to this: if CI/CD pipelines are software, there ought to be a platform for developing that software, and an ecosystem of developers creating value around that platform. Dagger aspires to create that missing developer ecosystem. If we succeed, there will be no shortage of business opportunities. If we fail, none of the other features will matter.