One of my neighbors has a fleet of solar-powered, zero-emission, self-fertilizing, biodiversity-boosting autonomous lawn-care bots. He calls them tortoises.
Appreciate the feedback! We actually just changed our pricing about a week ago. We used to do individual seats, but we found that smaller teams—especially those without a dedicated ops function—typically weren’t at the stage where they needed an API layer between devs and infrastructure.
For early-stage teams, a PaaS or ClickOps usually makes more sense. Massdriver really starts providing value when a team hits the point where devs need self-service, but ops still needs to enforce standards and visibility without becoming a bottleneck.
That said, we do have a free tier beyond the two-week trial for open-source projects, non-profits, and some partners. Happy to add you to it if you want to try it out—would love to be wrong about earlier-stage teams, but just haven’t seen it yet!
I love the idea of high-level intents and abstractions. They’re tough to get right, but when they click, they make dev teams move way faster.
Cloud APIs mix operational and developer concerns, which is part of the problem. A single API call for something like a database forces you to think about instance types, failover strategies, and security settings when all a developer really cares about is, "I need a database that can handle X traffic and supports Y extensions."
I’m actually working on a write-up about abstractions for a CNCF infra white paper and would love to get your thoughts. A lot of teams struggle with the balance between standardization and flexibility, and it sounds like you’ve thought a lot about this too. Let me know if you’d be up for a chat.
Hey! How's it been? I followed you on bsky a few days ago!
Glad you liked it! Yeah, the typed connections are a big part of what makes Massdriver powerful. It makes sure infrastructure components integrate right without devs having to worry about all the low-level details.
We're expanding the graph metadata with a querying system coming out of alpha soon that lets you ask stuff like "Where are all my t3 instances in production?" or "Which services are using a kubernetes version less than 1.25" Makes it way easier to understand what’s running where.
And since it’s all API-first, it’s easy to write quick scripts for reporting or automating changes across environments.
There are probably some dashboards that can give you that information easily. Where having the graph is interesting is scripting something that can test changes to a widely used module. With all of your config behind an API you could pull the live config of every instance of that module, run your change against it, and then trigger a deployment of each one of the modules in isolation with the new code. The least interesting part of the API is search.
> * You want to simplify infrastructure, but there's a new learning curve here. Why did you decide to go with diagramming as a solution? What other methods did you evaluate and discard?
We try to make it so both teams have to learn as little as possible. For the ops team, we are built on the tools those teams are familiar with terraform, helm, ansible, etc. Our extension model is also ops-oriented. You add add'l provisioners by writing Dockerfiles, you enforce pre-validations with JSON Schema (this is the best we could come up w/, but figured it was a safe bet ops-wise since its a part of OpenAPI). For devs, they dont have to learn the ops teams tools to provision infrastructure, they just diagram. Massdriver was originally a wall of YAML to connect all the pieces, but it felt fumbly (and like everything else).
I wanted to make a VR version like something youd see in a bad hacker movie, but Dave told me not to get ahead of myself. :D
> * How does an organization with existing infrastructure implement Massdriver?
Depends on if they have IaC or not. If they have IaC, they publish the modules. If their IaC has a state backend, its usually just good to go, if they are using localfiles for state, we offer a state server they can push state into.
If teams dont have IaC, we run workshops on "reverse terraforming" or "tofuing" and also offer professional services to codify that stuff for you.
> * How do you handle edge cases, custom configurations, complex logic, etc.? For example, workflows that use custom scripts or some other form of band-aid.
As noted above, its all based off common ops tooling. Lets say you wanted to use a new sec scanning tool for IaC and we don't have it in our base provisioners, you can write a dockerfile, build the image, then you can include that scanning tool in any of your massdriver configs. We also have folks doing day-2 operations with the platform. Things like database migrations and whatnot. The lines in the graph actually carry information and can push that info across different tools, so you can do things like have helm charts get information from a terraform run. You can build a provisioner with say the psql tool or a helm chart running bucardo and use it to set up replication between an old and new postgres instance.
> * The visual approach could make it too easy to piece together infrastructure without understanding the implications. How do you prevent developers from creating poorly architected systems just because you make it simple to connect components?
The lines and connections are actually a type system that you can extend (also based on JSON Schema). That way ops teams can encode common things into the platform once. ie. this is how we authenticate to postgres, its an AWS secret, security gruops and these IAM policies. All of that information flows across the line into the other module. The modules reject invalid types so common misconfigurations _cant_ happen. It also lets you "autocomplete" infrastructure. Lets say I'm a dev and I want to deploy a database. I can drop it on the canvas, since massdriver understands the types, it'll automatically connect it to a subnet that dev has access to.
> * When things go wrong, how do developers debug issues at the infrastructure level? Do they reach out to ops?
They may, we have a lot of stuff built in though to make the system as truly self-service (through day 2) as possible. There are runbooks per module so ops teams that have built out a module around a use case can put in common trouble shooting steps and its all accessible from the same graph. Alarms and metrics also show up there. Ops teams can also publish day-2 modules to the catalog, so developers can drag and drop common one-off tasks for maintenance onto their canvas and perform it.
The VR version of network management already existed [1]. It was called CA [2] Unicenter TNG. It really could use an update with some rendering with Unreal Engine! :D
Unrelated but could be confused with what was seen in Jurassic Park as "Unix".
