
Fashionable DevOps turned again the clock on agile software program improvement. Them’s preventing phrases, however they’re phrases Cory O’Daniel, the CEO of Massdriver, stands by. From his viewpoint, engineers in the present day are sometimes caught ready on different groups in order that they will write code, creating irritating bottlenecks.
“DevOps was alleged to be practices,” O’Daniel informed TechCrunch through e mail. “[It’s] not agile, it’s ‘waterfall.’ Fashionable DevOps is waterfall in agile clothes.”
Some surveys present that DevOps is certainly hampered by challenges with infrastructure. According to CloudBolt, 11% of builders responding to a 2021 ballot discovered their CI/CD infrastructure dependable whereas over half (55%) had issue creating constant pipeline environments.
That’s why O’Daniel, along with Chris Hill and Dave Williams, co-founded Massdriver in 2021. Massdriver’s platform is designed to help with managing infrastructure and apps at enterprises, permitting engineers to deploy infrastructure with out cloud experience.
“Williams and I had been engaged on a facet mission and we obtained into an argument about who was going to do the operations work. Right here we had been, two seasoned ops engineers with greater than 15 years expertise every in cloud operations, arguing over who was going to must do the grunt work,” O’Daniel stated. O’Daniel was beforehand principal software program architect at The RealReal and a cloud options architect at Container Heroes, an IT consultancy. “We each simply wished to put in writing value-producing software program for the enterprise. That is the place the concept of Massdriver was born.”

Picture Credit: Massdriver
Utilizing Massdriver, clients select from prebuilt infrastructure “bundles” that they will connect with create programs throughout areas or cloud suppliers with a visible device. Postdeployment, the programs could be monitored from Massdriver’s admin dashboard, which additionally helps orchestrate options like cloud outage detection and automatic standing pages.
O’Daniel emphasised that Massdriver’s alert notifications take customers to a diagram of their infrastructure and spotlight the impacted elements, moderately than forcing them to hop between instruments like PagerDuty, Datadog, and Terraform. This month will see the discharge of steady deployment assist, complementing the present assist for container registries and DNS administration.
“We’re taking a unique method to constructing out inner developer platforms … We give engineers a diagramming interface. It’s their supply of fact. It’s their documentation when onboarding new teammates. It’s how they managed and monitor their infrastructure,” O’Daniel stated. “We wish to meet corporations the place they’re at and allow them to choose the most effective device for the job.”
Since comfortable launching in March, O’Daniel says that Massdriver has reached “nicely into” six-figure annual recurring income and “mid-80%” gross margin. (Gross margin is the distinction between income and price of products offered, divided by income; a determine above 75% is taken into account wholesome.) Regardless of competitors from Upbound and Humanitec, the corporate has round 100 builders throughout 35 organizations managing over 80 compute environments, and plans to broaden its 11-person workforce inside the subsequent month.
Lately, Massdriver — which is backed by Y Combinator — raised $4 million in seed funding. O’Daniel says that the funds shall be used to exit the minimal viable product section and “proceed to make the product easier for all caliber of engineers to deploy production-ready infrastructure.”
“Massdriver permits engineers and IT workers to ship safe infrastructure quicker with guardrails — much less worrying about infrastructure, extra assured supply … Anybody within the org can open the device and get insights into infrastructure, knowledge providers, and purposes at a look,” O’Daniel stated. “At Massdriver, we wish to let engineers engineer to allow them to deal with delivering enterprise worth, not toiling over configuring commodity infrastructure — and that’s what the C-suite needs, too.”
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