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Comment by written-beyond | Hacker News Reader

Congrats on the launch!

I'm not a seasoned DevOps professional but I'm usually the one who ends up provisioning or setting up VMs, serverless stuff and DBs. I just don't understand the product.

You make reusable TF modules that have security and policies baked in. Engineers use a UI to hookup those modules and Massdriver does the deployment work for you.

Sounds like a godsend for big teams but I don't see pre-funded Startups being able to afford a $500/mo fee. For funded ones that's highly approachable but their problems with their IaC wouldn't be as visible.

Honestly, in smaller teams you can get pretty far with just setting thing sup through your cloud providers web console and just focus on what your building.

Since the fee is kind of steep, what's the justification for this. Is it that the workflow improvements would significantly improve productivity which would justify the cost or is the service itself expensive to run and maintain.

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Thanks! And ... you're right!

Massdriver isn’t aimed at pre-funded startups. Early-stage teams are often better off with a PaaS or setting things up manually until ops challenges become a bottleneck.

Our pricing (5-seat minimum) is intentional to dissuade smaller teams. The real value kicks in when teams need self-service. Ops teams build the modules (not us), and Massdriver acts as the interface. Developers diagram what they need, and Massdriver provisions using the ops team’s standards. This keeps developers focused on building while giving ops visibility and control over what’s deployed.

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 recommend you guys to them because managing deployments from over a dozen teams located around the world is hell for them. However they have an extensive private cloud setup, would your solution be as applicable to them as it is to companies running on public clouds?

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 <5 people tend to either go all-in on the cloud, or their own servers if bootstrapping. For teams on the cloud, they don't need your product, yet. For teams who are running their own private clouds, they do. Eventually, they'll grow into the cloud and bam, they start paying you.

It's a long game, but might be worth it.

If this is for the company I think it is for, they won’t use this as they have a very strong NIH culture.

Never heard of the phrase, "NIH culture" before. What does that mean?

That's "not invented here". HN could really benefit from a glossary of acronyms.

How do you intend to get any adoption with pricing like that? I’m certainly not going to drop several hundred dollars to see if your product is better than any of the freely available IaC tools.

Not trying to critizice, just don’t understand how this works. I’ve got my company to pay for Pulumi after several years of usage, but I needed to be able to use it to get that far.

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