Massdriver wants to abstract away infrastructure to let devs focus on coding

techcrunch.com:

Modern DevOps turned back the clock on agile software development. Them’s fighting words, but they’re words Cory O’Daniel, the CEO of Massdriver, stands by. From his point of view, engineers today are often stuck waiting on other teams so that they can write code, creating frustrating bottlenecks.

“DevOps was supposed to be practices,” O’Daniel told TechCrunch via email. “[It’s] not agile, it’s ‘waterfall.’ Modern DevOps is waterfall in agile clothing.”

Some surveys show that DevOps is indeed hampered by challenges with infrastructure. According to CloudBolt, 11% of developers responding to a 2021 poll found their CI/CD infrastructure reliable while over half (55%) had difficulty creating consistent pipeline environments.

That’s why O’Daniel, together with Chris Hill and Dave Williams, co-founded Massdriver in 2021. Massdriver’s platform is designed to assist with managing infrastructure and apps at enterprises, allowing engineers to deploy infrastructure without cloud expertise.

“Williams and I were working on a side project and we got into an argument about who was going to do the operations work. Here we were, two seasoned ops engineers with more than 15 years experience each in cloud operations, arguing over who was going to have to do the grunt work,” O’Daniel said. O’Daniel was previously principal software architect at The RealReal and a cloud solutions architect at Container Heroes, an IT consultancy. “We both just wanted to write value-producing software for the business. This is where the idea of Massdriver was born.”

Image Credits: Massdriver

Using Massdriver, customers choose from prebuilt infrastructure “bundles” that they can connect to create systems across regions or cloud providers with a visual tool.