lredd

Clutch is super cool! I'd say our main differences are that we offer a hosted product and we're not focused on infra management. While it's clear from this thread that self-hosting is critical for some companies, many others prefer a hosted product so that they don't have to manage any additional infra. They're also specifically aimed at helping devs manage their infra, while Onu's focus is helping devs share scripts with their non-technical teammates. We're seeing that most of our early customers are product engineers who have to interface with ops or CX often. Do you use Clutch?

Regarding Backstage, I've actually never heard of it! I'm skimming through it now and on first glance I'm not sure how we would integrate with them. Do you use Backstage? What would a helpful integration with Onu look like for you?

Hey! Thanks for this perspective! You're definitely right that we don't yet have some of the enterprise level features that we need. This is definitely something we're thinking deeply about and are prioritizing these features on our roadmap!

Re: companies letting engineers SSH into prod environments -- this probably happens at very established companies more than we'd like to admit ;) Chine and I have unfortunately had to do this on numerous occasions at a previous companies. It was super stressful and not great! This is part of the reason why we're building Onu -- to provide a safe and audited way to run business critical scripts.

I'm curious about your internal tools API suggestion. Can you say more about that? What would the API be hitting?

thank you!

This is great feedback! Thanks y'all! We're starting with our hosted product so that folks can sign up and get started immediately. This has helped us get initial feedback and iterate super quickly. That said, releasing a self-serve, self-hosted version of Onu is a big item on our roadmap. We've heard lots of conflicting opinions on the necessity for a self-hosted version of the app, but this feedback definitely helps validate how necessary it will be.

I agree! We'll work on that.

Thanks for this feedback! We know our website is pretty barebones right now, but working on putting more info there. We'll also work on making this clearer on our docs!

No, sorry that was unclear! Developers write the code that creates the tools on Onu and then non-technical teams use the tools that the devs create.

The main difference is that Onu generates a frontend UI for your scripts! This means that the non-technical folks on your team have access to the scripts that typically only engineers can run. In our experience, non-technical teams typically don't know how to use AWS lambdas or CF works

Hi! Thanks for bringing this up! To clarify, the organizations are not public. On the org creation page it does say "What's the name of your organization? This will be visible to other members." But this means other members of your organization, not anyone outside of it. I hope that helps!

Agree! The end users of the tools created on Onu are typically non-technical, while jenkins, rundeck, etc seem to prioritize very technical users. Our goal is to make running the scripts from the Onu platform as approachable and friendly as possible for the non-technical folks on your team.

thank you!

Hi! Yes, thanks for the clarification! And by "robust frontends" I meant "advanced views," so you're totally right! The goal with Onu is for you to be able to build those advanced views completely in backend code instead of using React. We made this choice so that pure backend engineers wouldn't have to learn React to build internal tools. In fact, I didn't know any react while being an infra eng at lyft! We've heard this from a lot of other backend engineers as well -- they don't want to deal with react components.

To define inputs in Onu, devs use our SDK! This is actually what Airplane does as well (I think they deprecated their yaml config).

We've got a Slack integration, and we're working on many more! Any in particular that would be most helpful to you?

Hi! Thanks for asking -- the main difference is that devs build tools on Onu completely in backend code. Airplane requires some react code to build more robust frontends.