We just opened a time capsule from 2003 and couldn't believe what we found. An AOL CD-ROM with 2,000 free hours; a Dell blade server chassis; and a Blue Collar Comedy Tour DVD. We couldn't install AOL, the blade server power supply was dead, but our Blue Collar DVD works just fine. We were reminded again about Jeff Foxworthy’s “

” skits as the star of the show. So we channeled our inner blue collar comedy and applied it to container orchestration—because, hey, why not?

If you rewrote 20 Amazon CloudFormation scripts last week...you might be building a PaaS

It’s not 2003 anymore, but it was way easier back then to know what you had running. You couldn’t spin up new clusters and configurations. Your server literally existed in meatspace or it literally didn’t. Today in 2023, you’re spending hours rewriting CloudFormation scripts provisioning servers like a jackhammer. Every. Damn. Day. Just before you punch a hole through your monitor, you import (or write) a tool to handle updating the scripts. Before you know it, you’re on your way to building a kickass PaaS that’ll work until next week.

If you need to learn a new kubectl command every day…you might be building a PaaS

Remember destroying all those little aliens hopping on the screen in the game Space Invaders? Managing k8s clusters can feel a bit like that. Applications and services keep showing up in new clusters, eating resources. And it’s your job to shut them down before everything’s out of control. 

So you download kubectl to control your Kubernetes clusters. And then helm. Then kubectx and kubens and stern and k9s and bootkube and ktunnel. Oh, and Kops. Then maybe monokle to see how that goes.

Soon you’ve got more tools in place to manage your Kubernetes infra than domain names you bought last new years eve. Maybe it’s time to buy a ream of paper for all the pages you’ll need when you print out your “kubectl cheat sheet” - or the docs for what might as well be your new PaaS.

If you find yourself checking to see if there are any updates to Heroku you want to copy…you might be building a PaaS

Hate Heroku, the great grandaddy of PaaS? When you started out with Kubernetes, you took a look at Heroku and rejected it because it wasn’t cool anymore or because some DevOps engineer laughed when you suggested the idea. More realistically, you probably felt like it was too much of a black box. If Heroku didn’t support it, then you were stuck. No flexibility. 

But now that you’re building out your k8s you’re finding that you’re boxing yourself in. Maybe Heroku has a feature you really would like to use. Maybe you can copy it? Maybe Stack Overflow has the answer. Maybe you’re building a PaaS after all?

If you find yourself chasing the perfect service catalog (that devs will refuse to use!)…you might be building a PaaS

Building a service catalog is a necessary evil. You need rigor, you need documentation, you need maturity and management. Most of all, you need your dev teams to use it.

But let’s be honest: they won’t. Deep down in your heart of hearts, you just know they’re going to tear it down in some backchannel Slack discussion or subtweet (sub-X?) you.  

The more you perfect it, the more you hear that it’s not ready. It’s finally dawning on you that it’s *never* going to be good enough for them. But you are so far into your sunken cost that you haven’t realized that you’re halfway to building a PaaS.

If you’re building a Cloud Platform team instead of your product…you might be building a PaaS

NOW HIRING: Engineers who can build a platform for engineers who can deliver value to the market.

Getting your cloud platform right is the secret to getting your product right—running smoothly, scaling up (and down) just as you need. It’s so easy. Just get a few cloud-native DevOps engineers on staff and you’re golden.

The actual problem? There’s a talent shortage. Everyone from 

 to the donut shop around the corner is dealing with it. It sucks. How are you supposed to get your PaaS-like-but-totally-not-a-PaaS provisioning and orchestration platform up and running?

If you’ve used the words “developer experience” when talking about building tools for you infrastructure…you might be building a PaaS

It started so simple. A little JIRA request, a little Cloud Formation templating, a little auto-generated YAML—you were off to the races. You built it at a hackathon. It was going to change the future of the company. Then one of your devs said, “The developer experience around this needs to be better.”

You’re thinking, “Be better? Are you kidding me? I built this in 4 hours with nothing but a bowl of spicy Takis and a 6-pack of Liquid Death. I’m a genius. You should be worshiping at my feet right now.”

Besides, wtf is a “developer experience?” We’re building tools for kubernetes. We’re lucky to even have me here to be orchestrating all this. You don’t like it? Go build your own platfor–uh, service.

If you’re building internal docs and runbooks to keep your services running…you might be building a PaaS

You wrote the main page. That should be good enough, right? Nope.

These cloud services are getting complex. But what’s the limit? How many edge cases do you need to describe? How much do you need to write? You find yourself adding more and more background and pointers to platform docs just to get your team up to speed. The devs keep saying the docs need to be clearer and add more context. You might as well be writing Kubernetes for Dummies. Wait—that’s actually a good idea!

Obviously, this is all in good fun, but if any of this sounds remotely familiar, you gotta ask yourself: What are you doing writing all this stuff? It’s a solved problem. Like, okay, Heroku may not be it anymore. But is there really nothing out there that can solve your Kubernetes problems in the 2023rd year of our lord? It’s not just the time you’re spending. It’s also the cost. Build vs. buy is what they say. If you don’t have a really good reason to build then take that money you are spending on building and just buy a solution. Done.

Of course there is. I mean, there’s a freaking 

 out there. Why wouldn’t there be something that fixes cloud provisioning and orchestration?

Listen, we’re not saying you need to try Aptible… but you should probably try Aptible.

We just opened a time capsule from 2003 and couldn't believe what we found. An AOL CD-ROM with 2,000 free hours; a Dell blade server chassis; and a Blue Collar Comedy Tour DVD. We were reminded again about Jeff Foxworthy’s “You might be a redneck” skits as the star of the show. So we channeled our inner blue collar comedy and applied it to container orchestration—because, hey, why not?

You might be building a PaaS if…

A good user interface (UI) is not just about aesthetics. It plays a pivotal role in the overall developer experience. A thoughtfully designed UI abstracts away the complexity of the underlying systems and delivers intuitive interaction, clear visuals, and seamless navigation. And ultimately enables developers to focus on what truly matters: building, testing, and deploying quality code.

We’ll be the first to admit that the developer experience on our UI has been lacking, to say the least. But that ‘meh’ experience ends today. We've listened to your feedback and spent unknown hours refining our design and functionality to bring you a more intuitive, efficient, and visually appealing UI. 

We're excited to introduce a host of new features that will make managing your deployments a breeze.

Our new UI streamlines the deployment process, giving users the ability to not only deploy their applications, but also manage configurations (previously only doable in the CLI), and seamlessly add additional endpoints and databases as needed. But that’s not all — users can now view real-time logs to debug any issue they come across, and re-run operations, all directly from the UI.

With our new UI, we’ve brought a responsive design that adapts to screens of all sizes, ensuring readability, functionality, and speed. We’ve also introduced a collapsible navigation menu and new sidebar that allows users to deploy new environments, and explore stacks, environments, apps, and databases within their organization.

Find what you need quickly and easily. Search for stacks, environments, apps, and databases by Name, Type, or ID. We’ve even added recently viewed and most visited sections to help you quickly locate your favorite resources.

The bulk of our redesign efforts fall into the category of pages. Pages are where the majority of interactions happen, questions are answered, and confidence is gained. We meticulously redesigned each page to simplify your deployment management tasks.

Yes, everyone says ‘this is just the start’ and rarely do any follow up. But, we’re going to buck the trend. We know the work is not done and that this is just the beginning. During this whole process, we kept on uncovering more and more areas and features we thought - hey that could be way better.

But, we’re still quite happy with where our UI has gotten to. We think it’s a significant leap forward in user experience and functionality, and we hope you feel the same. We can't wait for you to explore and use the enhancements we've introduced! And, we’d love any and all feedback you have as you use Aptible — you can easily share feedback with us from the UI, in the footer.

A Fresh Look at Aptible’s UI

One thing we all love at Aptible are t-shirts. These versatile garments are more than just a piece of clothing covering one’s torso — they're an expression of identity and a canvas for creativity. T-shirts have a unique way of showcasing our passions and affiliations to the world.

So we thought, why not take our love of t-shirts and combine it with what we’re doing here at Aptible. Our mission is to enable developers to do more with less infrastructure. We’re calling it the No Infrastructure future. Imagine, what if you didn’t have to manage infrastructure? What if you didn’t have to deal with the complexities of provisioning, the challenges of scaling, and the burden of infrastructure maintenance? There’s very few (although they probably do exist) that want to spend more time dealing with infrastructure.

Introducing our initial collection of ‘No Infra’ shirts. This collection serves as a tangible representation of shedding the burdens of software infrastructure.

To share our love of shirts and the ‘No Infrastructure’ movement, we’re giving this initial collection of shirts away for free. 

And, this collection of shirts will not be reprinted. Once they're gone, they're gone for good. So experience Aptible's platform and claim your shirt before it’s gone.

BlogCTA

👕 Deploy your first app and get a ‘No Infra’ shirt.

For any first time users, simply sign up for Aptible, deploy your first application, and you’ll receive a t-shirt.

Deploy a Shirt 👕

At Aptible, we’re always focused on making it easier for engineering teams to manage their cloud infrastructure. This month, we’re excited to introduce a new set of features designed to automation easier with the use of Terraform!

Pre-built Grafana Dashboards and Alerting

Start instantly monitoring your Aptible resources, all hosted within your Aptible account! Use the 

 to seamlessly provision Metric Drains with pre-built Grafana dashboards and alerts for monitoring RAM & CPU usage for your Apps & Databases.

Guide to minimizing downtime from AWS Outages

We've refreshed our Business Continuity guide to include recommended actions to minimize downtime caused by AWS outages. Start planning today!

This month, we’re excited to introduce a new set of features designed to automation easier with the use of Terraform!

What’s new with Aptible: October 2022

Pre-built Grafana Dashboards and Alerting

Guide to minimizing downtime from AWS Outages

See what else is new with Aptible

Coming Soon

More Posts

You might be building a PaaS if…

A Fresh Look at Aptible’s UI

Deploy a Shirt 👕

Focus on innovation.
Not Infrastructure.

Product

Resources

Support

Company

What’s new with Aptible: October 2022

Pre-built Grafana Dashboards and Alerting

Guide to minimizing downtime from AWS Outages

See what else is new with Aptible

Coming Soon

More Posts

You might be building a PaaS if…

A Fresh Look at Aptible’s UI

Deploy a Shirt 👕

Focus on innovation.Not Infrastructure.

Product

Resources

Support

Company

Focus on innovation.
Not Infrastructure.