Show HN: MadeiraCloud lets you draw AWS architecture and clone apps in minutes

Agreed. What type of app requires you to give up your credentials to something as sensitive as your infrastructures credentials?! No fucking way. Fix this asap.

Edit: Any admin that gives these up should probably not be in the role they are. I'd fire someone over something like this. The OP commented further down that "64%" gave up their credentials. I think their bosses need to know about that or their clients should be warned.

I don't care who this guys is and how much assurance he can offer; there is no reason for this.

I created a privilege-less IAM user and that seemed to do the trick.

Thanks for the honest criticism. I mostly agree and a video demo is in the works, although a full dummy demo would divert considerable resources away from developing the product at this stage.

Because we launch instances and volumes, create AMIs, SnapShots, KeyPairs and security groups, read only access would not suffice. We have considered creating an IAM template, but it would need nearly the same permissions as full access. But it would probably still be a good idea for users who aren't comfortable, at least that way they can see exactly what is required. I'll revisit this, thank you.

Thanks a lot!

It certainly has been an issue, lots of requests and suggestions to make entering AWS credentials optional, but as you say, without the right permissions it would be useless.

Fortunately, it's the same for all third party tools which rely on APIs, no way around it, so a lot of users are used to having to give them out.

I'll share some stats from our small sample size so far: 63% of users who requested an invite then logged in, then of those users 64% entered their credentials, albeit with quite a bit of coaxing and reassurance.

You are inherently saying this means something by choosing to pick it out and highlight it. Back to Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality for you ;).

It is fair to point this out, it is an understandable concern to people where a company is located, especially when dealing with sensitive data.

We don't try to hide the fact that we are based in Beijing (it is our location on our Twitter profile and there are several mentions of China in our blog) but we don't want to overly promote the fact either, for exactly this reason.

How does the knowledge that we are a Chinese company effect your decisions regarding our product? After finding this out did you go on to register and link with your AWS credentials?

Obviously, we can't help where we are located at this stage of the company, but I'd love to hear how you would recommend handling this from a business point of view.

I guess they came from the ChinaBang conference?

Yes, the live version currently only supports EBS and EC2, with RDS following soon (approximately one month) and ELB support to be added shortly after that.

I appreciate that the currently supported services does limit the scope of applications that our features could be useful for, but we felt that there are still a lot of people who can benefit from them right now and we wanted to get something out there early to get feedback. For sharing, for example, companies like http://labslice.com/ only support EC2 on its own.

There's more shown on the site's home page than is currently available in the actual UI. Guessing a lot left to be implemented and we're seeing just the "here's what'll eventually be possible" view on the "features" screens.

Thank you very much! It is indeed, but we haven't come across anyone who takes our approach, so hopefully it will be enough to differentiate ourselves.

We launched our private beta in February and haven't done any paid marketing since then, all our users have been from word of mouth, media exposure and of course, the great HN. We 'launched' at an early stage and have been iterating since. Currently we have less than 700 free beta users and we are not offering the premium service yet until we have implemented our MVP feature-set and have ironed out any bugs our beta users report. I will be more than happy to share this information in the future.

Do you think it's too similar? I love the dark design of Heroku, and obviously we also have purple branding, but I didn't think beyond that it was too similar.

I'll take it as a compliment, Heroku has a brilliant site and I hope ours can be as good but not appear to be anything close to a copy. It wasn't actually a reference during the design.

Do you have any suggestions on anything to change to make it less similar in your eyes?

The my site is indeed using Rubik as a base theme, Ginkgo (an Open Atrium theme) as a child theme and then a custom theme on top of that.

The www site is a heavily customised theme built on top of Twitter Bootstrap 2.

The ide site is 100% hand made.

It looks like a version of one of the most popular drupal themes, Rubik.

Unfortunately, our app relies on the AWS APIs, so without your credentials there's not a lot you will be able to do. We combined the AWS and password forms because we were getting a lot of support requests from people not entering them, so we felt it was best to force it early on.

We're not, no, but it is a beautiful word and also happens to be a South American river which is the largest tributary to some other river in the rainforest ;-)