Marketing brief

devo.ps is a SaaS that makes building, managing and automating your servers not suck.

We want to be to Ops/DevOps what Github is to development. We allow you to:

• Create, manage and delete servers on any cloud: AWS, Rackspace, Linode, Digital Ocean...
• Manage services and their related configurations on these servers (think NGINX, Varnishd or Ruby).
• Easily build automation for anything managed through devo.ps: backup or deployment strategies, throttling, scaling...
• And soon manage your applications.

Our core idea is organized around representing all concepts as simple JSON files (not unlike packages.json), making your infrastructure compact, portable, visible and transparent.

Keywords:

• Primary: DevOps, Infrastructure, Servers, Deployment, Automation, Scalability, Cloud, PaaS
• Secondary: IaaS, Configuration Management

What are people doing right now?

The following contextualizes the existing competition and provides pointers at the perceived shortcoming of our competitors. For a more exhaustive list refer have a look at the Competitors page.

There are currently two options to solve your DevOps issues:

• The (expensive) black box: Heroku, DotCloud, AppFog and the likes. You settle for somebody else's DevOps approach and decide to forget about the problem.
• The DIY approach: using various tools (Chef/Puppet, Capistrano, Jenkins...) and investing heavy resources into implementing parts of the DevOps tool chain (automation, orchestration, deployment...).

These do not answer the fundamental challenges:

• The Heroku-likes are mainly solving the deployment and (horizontal) scaling problems, while obfuscating the infrastructure layer, effectively locking you out of your own infrastructure. There are many (hard) problems beyond these issues, and if you're going to invest in solving them, you'd better own the solutions. Moreover, it gets very expensive very quickly.
• Building things on your own is not only expensive, but time consuming and risky. DevOps profiles are a rare breed and hard to evaluate. Moreover, this approach lacks portability and visibility.

Why choosing devo.ps?

Development and Operations are two different beasts. The Heroku stand is an attempt at obfuscating Operations from developers. Chef/Puppets are just better tools for Operations.

This is why we've witnessed teams moving on from Heroku passed a certain scale of operations, and why more Puppets/Chef doesn't mean a better collaboration between the teams (high barriers of entry and poor visibility, leaving development teams in the dark).

The bottom line:

• The larger portion of the market are companies who don't have (yet) a large and/or dedicated DevOps team but are passed the scale for Heroku.
• Companies need a better platform they can invest in freely: no lock-in, no technology limitations (or at least none they can't contribute to remove, that's why we propose an Open Source version), access to their infrastructure.

Development and Operations teams need a tool they can collectively build upon their infrastructure strategy, something reachable, visible and portable. We make this possible, mostly by keeping the way we describe the elements of that strategy as short JSON files.

Audience & Customers

Our audience is obviously technical. We intend to serve technical teams small and large. Our customers actually intersect heavily with Github's. A few examples of clients;

• Startups
• Dev shops
• Technical teams within larger companies (candidates for Enterprise).

Personas:

• Developer
• Ops
• Project manager

Founding team

• Vincent Viallet - Infrastructure: having worked with startups and Fortune 500, Vincent designs infrastructures that scale to millions of users. He leads all discussions related to ops, automation and security.
• Makara Wang - Development: Makara has been working on small to complex software architectures for the largest organizations in the world: CNN, the UN, the World Bank, governments... He spearhead the development team and the design of our software architecture.
• Ronan Berder - Founder: having previously built and scaled a consultancy working with the humanitarian world and Fortune 500, Ronan leverages his diverse background in software development, design, management and marketing to lead the business development, product management and marketing initiatives at devo.ps