Aptible’s New Look, and the future of PaaS

Aptible has a new look. But more importantly, we want to talk about the future of platform as a service, and how we intend to rapidly expand the value our platform delivers to you. Also, it’s the Aptible platform’s birthday!

Allow us to reintroduce ourselves. 

You might’ve noticed a few changes on aptible.com, in our docs, and in our product. Our visual design, how we talk about ourselves, our pricing page, and the product dashboard. What’s going on you ask?

Aptible has been fortunate to experience steady growth in our user base for the last 10 years, thanks primarily to the resilience and growth of our customers. Today marks the Aptible platform’s 9th official birthday. It also marks the beginning of the future for Aptible.

Aptible's homepage in 2013

We’re proud of how far we’ve come since the platform launched on March 21, 2014. But there’s so much more ground to cover if we’re going to achieve our vision of making it possible for any developer and company to launch and scale products without building and managing infrastructure.

Over the years we’ve gotten countless suggestions and ideas on how to improve our PaaS. The most useful source of feedback has been the hundreds of calls we’ve had with existing customers, and the many we’ve had with prospective customers as well. We intend to continue these discovery processes and, in fact, we intend to accelerate our pace of learning further.

Today’s changes are just a step in that direction. While we plan to rapidly expand the value our product provides to customers, and to iterate quickly, what we are “soft launching” today is just the first in a long line of changes we anticipate making. All with the same end goal in mind: continually improving how we eliminate the pains of building and managing infrastructure for companies like yours.

Upcoming changes that we’re particularly excited about are:

• A New Look for the Aptible Dashboard, and some of these improvements are available today
• Omnisearch across resources
• Deploy from Dashboard

But that’s just three changes. What’s guiding our focus moving forward?

“Magical” Experiences

While we’ve long delivered different user interfaces for our PaaS–CLI, Terraform, Dashboard–the developer experience, especially of our Dashboard, has become a bit dated. It certainly wasn’t the “magical” experience developers expect, or the one we want to deliver to make good on our promise to eliminate the pains of building and managing infrastructure.

We’re just at the beginning of this journey to deliver a magical developer experience. Our team is completely reimagining how developers use Aptible, making it more like this: 

1. You give Aptible code
2. Magic happens (behind the curtains Aptible is handling all the required setup and configuration, recognizing the requirements of your application and the necessary environment variables)
3. It works!

At the same time, we continue to tackle the really hard scaling problems we’ve worked with hundreds of fast growing companies to solve. Problems such as: optimizing resource costs via autoscaling, right-sizing, and instance class tuning, deploying complex architectures just as easily as monolithic web apps, and finding and fixing performance bottlenecks in distributed systems.

Building for all startups–and every company

Hundreds of digital health companies have used Aptible to go from 2 developers in a garage to unicorn status, successful acquisition, and even IPO. But few outside of digital health know of Aptible. 

Aptible has great security and compliance benefits that are, in truth, industry agnostic. While we’ll continue to ensure we’re the best PaaS for digital health startups, we know our PaaS can be useful to every startup, regardless of industry focus.

Thinking longer term, the reason Aptible exists is to enable every developer to focus on ideas, not infrastructure. We want to empower all developers to build valuable products for their customers, without dealing with the pain of building or managing infrastructure. This goes for all developers, from those working at early stage startups to those on enterprise product teams.

We believe that “No Infrastructure” is the future of software development. You’ll hear us talk about our “No Infrastructure” vision of the future more and more as we go forward. 

Our Look

While it may not feel as substantial as our plans to deliver magical developer experiences and tackling the scaling problems companies face, we’ve also updated our brand look and feel. We wanted a new, bright look that complements our optimistic outlook and commitment to our No Infrastructure vision. 

Of course, we love the Aptible arrow logo and didn’t want to replace it. So we turned to our friends at Overline, who helped us with our previous successful visual redesign. We went through several (SEVERAL) versions while we collaboratively iterated towards the look and feel that most resonated with our team and the value we want to bring to our customers. 

We hope you agree that this is a much needed improvement to our brand without straying too far from what worked well.

Pricing

Aptible pricing has stayed consistent for about a decade. We’re investing in ways to help companies manage costs on Aptible. The first two changes, while smaller, are a strong platform we can use to continue to improve how we help customers manage costs. Initially, we are releasing:

• Limits
• Plans

With Limits, companies can be sure to limit their infrastructure costs without running the risk of downtime. If you select a Limit (today, you’d select a Limit by picking a Plan), Aptible will ensure you don’t provision resources that would raise you above the max limits–and the max invoice–you’ve chosen.

Plans are the primary vehicle we are (currently) using to experiment with Limits. The point is to make it easier for companies to “choose” where they want their infrastructure spend to be based on the size, scale, and maturity of their project. 

For now, all existing Aptible customers will be grandfathered on their current pricing plan, and will not have Limits enforced. Going forward, based on your feedback, we may make Limits accessible beyond the first set of Plans we’ve implemented, making them available across the customer base. Beyond that, we anticipate continuously releasing cost optimization tools to help you control your Aptible invoice.

What’s Next

We’re still the same Aptible that hundreds of companies and thousands of developers have trusted to run their infrastructure for the past decade. We’re just making some changes, seeking to accelerate investment in our PaaS, ensuring we are continuously improving on how we deliver our “No Infrastructure” vision, and being the best PaaS for both starting and scaling a company on, without the pain of managing infrastructure.

Don’t hesitate to reach out to any of us or your account manager if you have any questions, suggestions, or requests. We’d love to hear your thoughts, and any ideas you have on how we can better deliver the best possible PaaS.

And most importantly, thank you to all of our customers for their support, product usage, and continuous feedback. We love working with each of you and plan to continue to earn your trust and make good on our “No Infrastructure” vision so we can run your infrastructure (so you don’t have to) for many years to come.