pravanjanc

3 years ago, I was a CTO at a late-stage company struggling with slow releases due to insufficient automation and non-standard tooling. Spinning up new environments was a month-long ordeal.

To solve this, my co-founders and I built an in-house "architecture-first" DevOps solution - which eventually became Facets, a comprehensive DevOps automation platform. We got early validation, raised funding, and built one of the largest feature sets in the DevOps space.

But through conversations with companies of all sizes, we realized two key problems:

We had built an overly complex enterprise product without enough user feedback.

Developers, especially from early-stage startups, needed something more self-serve and simple.

So we're taking a new direction with Facets 2.0. The focus is now on quick, clean cloud deployments optimized for early-stage startup developer workflows. When you have limited resources but growing workloads, infrastructure challenges can feel daunting. We want to take that off your plate.

Over the next few weeks, we'll be stripping down our giant platform to create something any developer or DevOps engineer can easily use.

While I don’t have a version ready right now, I want to get your early feedback on the idea and our landing page. https://www.facets.cloud/quick-cloud-deployments

We’ve also opened up slots for our Beta program to get as much user feedback as possible. If you’d like to help us out, let me know and I’ll reach out to you.

Let me know what you think!

> how do you sell to enterprise? how does that even work?

It's not working as much as we want it to. I mean early sales were from network. But being a one man sales team, it's really difficult to map multiple personas in an enterprise and sell to them. That's why we are stripping down our product to something people can buy in a self-serve manner. Getting a good number of users quickly is what's most important for an early stage startup is what I've realized.

Understood. We'll try to make the benefit more specific.

> The value would be that I can drag and drop mongodb into the scene in your ui and then click "deploy to aws" and it works immediately without having to know anything about aws.

This is correct. You can drag and drop moduels like mongodb and deploy to your cloud environments with ease. We're also gonna provide templates of well-known tech stacks.

As for infrastructure-as-code - Yes, we are built on Terraform, and IaC sits in your repository. But it's auto-generated, you don't have to spend time on writing scripts. But whenever you need to interact with the code, you can - from your github repo.

So the idea is that you'd be able to manage your cloud environments easily since most of it will be automated. And their's an abstraction layer which helps you reduce the complexity of dealing with the infrastructure. You won't have to rely on infrastructure experts to manage your environments.

Essentially the larger thing is having ready-to-use infrastructure definitions (stacks - like MERN) and easily create environments out of it

What do you use for summaries? A friend recently created such a tool to summarize and collate his newsletters.

Can you provide some context? I've worked at a company for nearly 10 years, and then left the job to start up something on my own. It's been three years doing that and it's filled with ups and downs. Not all days are rosy but if your fundamentals are solid I think it works out in the end.

Maybe if you give some context, i can help better.

> Understood. But what if you have a multi-cloud setup or you want to migrate to a different cloud to efficiently use credits?

So yeah, one of the clients we were working with had to move from AWS to GCP (mostly for utilizing cloud credits). The setup was small but the estimated time was nearly 2-3 months. It's really a pain, and I think a lot of organizations don't think of doing it because when they weigh rewards and the effort/time needed, it doesn't make sense.