Day 2 - customer outreach

Quick Recap: I'm building a platform as a service with a visual builder (think Heroku but with a canvas to design your system architecture + 1-click deploy).

I reached out to a few engineer friends who work at medium size to big tech companies. They mostly deploy infrastructure through an internal pipeline. Their process is:

1. Write a design doc with a system architecture diagram
2. Get the design doc reviewed and approved by peers and tech leads
3. Deploy infra

Depending on the context, they sometime will go into AWS to provision an RDS instance manually or do it via the CLI. The most painful part of this for them was the long review process and for the Jr. engineers, the unfamiliarity of the AWS console (which is quite messy) and internal pipelines.

A few takeaways from these conversations

1. Deploying infra manually clearly sucks (I don't understand why they didn't use heroku)
2. The combination of long reviews + unfamiliarity with infra tools is frustrating for devs
3. The Jr. devs I talked to needed significant help from more senior devs when deploying their infra

I have more conversations scheduled for the rest of the week. I'm also working on a simple proof of concept that I'm aiming to get done by the end of next week.