▲ ▼ Simple CLI for cloud deployments.
I am a DevOps cloud engineer working with a team of designers, frontend and data engineers. I am seeing that the cloud stuff goes over their heads, and they hate the deployment process. For example; spinning up a group of databases to test an ETL job, deploying a site, or putting some script on a schedule. Even stuff like TerraForm is hard for them. They use AWS Lambdas for simple setups, but when the code base gets large and complex they come running to my team to help them deploy, or create new layers for their Lambdas. Oh, and no-one I know seems to use Heroku anymore. A few frontend guys use zeit.co, but they still need to create the database elsewhere. Lately, I am spending time creating and maintaining scripts at work to help developers and designers deploy common stuff quickly. I feel there is a needgap for a simple CLI tool that can ease the pain of cloud provisioning. Something that abstracts scaling, security, DNS, etc, and gets resources talking to each other.
The issue with abstraction tools designed to let anyone do X in cloud are that, when they get big to do more; there will be a need gap for another abstraction tool over it and in the end that tool will end up as the responsibility of a DevOps personnel as well.
Hi Abishek, thanks for the reply.
You are right that abstractions create more of the same as projects get bigger and mature. I was thinking of a needgap for a tool to create and destroy short lived services, like testing environments, demos, static sites, or scheduled scripts. Like why build out complex setups for a demo site, POC project, a landing page, or database test. If things go well with this simple deployment then it should be moved into its own less abstracted setup away from this tool. Like how projects evolve from Heroku. Sometimes I think they planned for complex projects to migrate away from them, I remember people mostly using Heroku for the simple stuff I described above.
Understood, did you try any of the several docker based automated deployment tools out there? e.g. https://drone.io/.
The people that I work with, most of them don't even know the technical details of Docker. All they know is common stuff, like databases, programming languages, and the web/mobile frontend stack. Cloud/servers/deployments, is out of their league. So more often than not, I find myself just helping them with the "end result". Like, I need a Jupyter/Tensorflow with DB access, or a PHP runtime with a MySQL behind it, how you get there I dont care, just make this setup and deploy my code. I dont know, maybe its just a few people that I know who are like this.