[Idea] Code and Infra Bot

Although for living I do Product management wudoo magic, but end up writing a lot of code.

As a developer and user of these cloud platforms, here’s my wishlist. Hope someone solves it. (or I might have to rollup my sleeve and do it 🙂 )

TL;DR: Even if infra availability and management has become easy, it’s still a lot of learning and work. It ends up taking my focus away from code.

  • None of the public cloud providers give a Dev, Test, Live environments. While everyone should know that a developer needs “atleast” one non-prod environment.
    • Why don’t you ask: “Hey, does this app require an additional non-live environment”? (look at Pantheon.io, Stripe, Pusher.com – to name a new – they totally get the value of giving additional non-prod environment(s))
  • Why ask us to write so many YAML files? Programming languages have been abstracting the underlying machine level instructions, stacks like containers/ k8s have been abstracting the nitty – gritties of packaging and operations etc, so why not abstract how these abstractions work?
    • Just ask few questions:
      • Which cloud?
      • Looks like you are deploying Rails – do you care if your app goes to appengine or k8s?
        • If yes, ask which one – and generate appropriate app.yaml or docker files. If no, just do that stuff in background.
      • Do you need HA for your db? (another way to ask could be : Is this for Prod because I can give you HA for that)
        • Again, update appropriate config files in the code or wherever needed
      • Looks like you are deploying a container – Is this a background service or does it serve a web request?
        • Based on the response: Create appropriate deployment/ service yaml files
        • Yeah, if it’s a web container, you can ask more questions – ports etc.
    • If the YAML/ config needs to be upgraded in future, then this service should help upgrade.

Hope someone builds infrastructure management from the viewpoint of a developer.

Look around – we are building chatbots for sales, support, e-commerce and so many other domains – why can’t there be a bot for a developer or ops person?