August 28, 2023

Commoditized Operations

↯ One big idea to spark your curiosity

The growing zeitgeist is that “platform engineering is the future.” And given that I co-founded a product in the space, I sure hope so! Unfortunately, organizations can’t get there by expecting the “DevOps” team to do it. I’m sorry, but copy/pasting some Terraform modules between your git repos is a terrible “platform.” Your engineers don’t want to deal with it, and inevitably your ops team will be on the hook for supporting it. Hell, even HashiCorp is jumping on the “no code” provisioning train for their “please contact sales” plan. Huh, seems like all these companies with enterprise bucks are struggling too.

So how does the average organization get to the promised land of Platform Engineering?

Simple, just hire some more frontend and backend engineers to develop a great internal PaaS with all the golden paths your operations team is architecting while you are trying to build your actual product that runs on top of it.

DevOps Is Bullshit, Massdriver

Funding

↯ Developer-friendly companies that announced new funding rounds

Portkey, a platform for deploying and managing AI applications, including observability, model management, and compliance, raised $3m in Seed funding.

Kombai, a generative AI tool for generating React and HTML CSS code from designs, raised $4.5m in Seed funding.

Qase, a test management platform that helps teams with tracking and reporting on manual and automated testing, raised $7.2m in funding.

Massdriver, a visual internal developer platform (IDP) that helps engineers deploy production-ready cloud infrastructure and applications, raised $8m in Seed funding.

Modular, a composable suite of tools that simplifies AI infrastructure for developers, raised $100m in funding.

Hugging Face, a platform where the machine learning community can collaborate on models, datasets, and applications, raised $235m in Series D funding.