Building a product is hard. Taking an idea from inception to launch requires a focused vision, persistent determination, resilience to heart-breaking setbacks and courage to release your baby into the world.
\nAt OpsGuru, we have all the respect in the world for the blood, sweat, and tears that go into product development. So much so, in fact, that we asked ourselves, what should we do to help our clients build and release products more easily? The answer: nothing. Instead, we decided to focus on an even harder problem: ensuring your product survives first contact with the real world.
\nThe last two decades have seen incredible innovations in product development processes, methodologies, and tooling. Many of the old pain points in software development have been solved. Cloud infrastructure (public or private) provides a programmable, inexpensive, foundation on which to build software systems. Containers are now the de-facto standard for packaging applications and provide a clean interface to separate application code from configuration parameters. Much of the toil involved in designing large-scale systems is now fully automatable with Kubernetes, service mesh technology, and advanced CI/CD tooling.
\nWhat does all this mean? It means you can build very complex systems very quickly. It means your engineers can quickly gain confidence in their solutions as they rapidly iterate and combine the powerful abstractions provided by the cloud, orchestration and service mesh tiers. But, most importantly, it means that without careful and constant attention, your product can become a mess of hastily connected components that is ready to implode under the slightest stress. It means, what initially looks like a successful day 1, can quickly become a day 2 “success disaster” as production load results in costly and embarrassing outages.
\nDay2Ops is about operational excellence that ensures Day 1 success is the start of a continuous curve up the hockey stick. It is about knowing that when you launch, the engineers that have poured their hearts into the product for months won’t be required to perform heroic actions at 2 am just to keep it alive. And it is about operational practices that make you confident in your ability to continuously improve and expand in response to rapidly changing market pressures - without risking an outage.
\nIn order to ensure excellence in delivering our Day2Ops services, OpsGuru focuses on three foundational areas:
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\nOur services in these areas are further augmented and supported through the use, contribution to, and development of Open Source technologies. OpsGuru’s flagship product is our Cloud Launchpad - a toolkit that allows our clients to rapidly build out foundational infrastructure that is aligned with industry best practices and design principles. And yes, our flagship product is free. It is part of our commitment to allowing you to focus on day 1, while ensuring you are prepared for day 2. In fact, in the very near future, we will be doubling down on that commitment by fully open-sourcing our Cloud Launchpad code base. That means it will be both “free as in speech” and “free as in beer”. Very soon we will be sharing how we implement Day2Ops in our Launchpad, so stay tuned!