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API Deployment as a Service?

I want to know if this product would be of use to anyone. It's most likely a "product" (if that's what it can be called) to sell to startups and small businesses.

The Problem

Most startups and SME's don't have the resources to hire a dedicated infrastructure person, and so just sling their API on Heroku, AWS EC2 or similar. The problem is that, as they grow they won't be able to create development environments for testing purposes, control the infrastructure programmatically and spend lots of manual time configuring this stuff (through the much loathed AWS UI).

Solution

At most companies I've worked at, a good portion of the time has been writing Terraform code and CI/CD pipelines to Dockerize their app. Hosting the image on Elastic Container Registry and configure ECS Fargate to host the app.

I do this because 99% of the time, this setup is far more cost efficient and allows a lot of flexibility in scaling and platform portability.

The "Product"

My problem is that I'm not sure how to turn this into a "product" or how to approach "customers". It would have to be a bespoke service so perhaps GumRoad is the way to go?
In any case, I know I would find this product useful but unsure if others have hit the same pain points.

Thanks for reading! :)

on August 26, 2021