Amethyst Platform
Application deployment made easy.
After a few months of silence caused by the recent changes in my personal and professional life as I kind of ran out of time and energy to work on it, I decided that today I'll be rebooting Amethyst Platform.
What does reboot mean?
Basically starting the project where I left it off, but with more focus on the business aspects of it rather than the development part, and aiming for an MVP as soon as possible, in the first quarter of 2021.
I wrote more an this at https://vladcalin.ro/blog/2020-12-26-rebooting-amethyst-platform if you are interested to read it.
Cheers!
Vlad Călin.
... and how early user feedback is a life saver!
After talking with some potential customers, I realized that the problem I had and I was sure a lot of other people have, is not actually that popular.
As an indie developer that is a full stack developer at his day job and is comfortable with all stages of product development (frontend, backend, devops), I always like to have total control over the applications I deploy, but I really hated lacking observability over what I deploy: enabling logging, monitoring and alerts for a few Docker containers for a new project I was working on was not worth the hassle, but I still hated not having them.
So I wanted to create a platform to fix exactly these issues: deploy Docker containers with logging, monitoring and alerts. I thought there are a lot of people out there wanting that.
What I wanted for Amethyst Platform to become was to be an alternative for Kubernetes. I kind of despise the complexity of Kubernetes and the fact that it has a pretty steep learning curve and a lot of moving parts that need to be managed together to get something useful. I thought more people were like me and wanted an alternative to the big giant that is growing quickly year by year.
But I was wrong. I sent some emails to a few indie hackers, and some of them were kind enough to reply and offer me very valuable information:
- most indie hackers don't want absolute control over every thing. They would gladly give up control at the very early stages to be able to iterate faster (a "duuh" moment, but I had to be told this to realize it)
- most people don't use Docker for everything like I do. I am a very small demographic of the target market, and if I target just my demographic, I won't have enough customers to sustain a business.
- Kubernetes, even if it is very popular in some developer communities, it will be long until it gets very popular in the indie startup space. And it will be a long time before people will look for alternatives, especially that most clouds are offering now managed Kubernetes clusters and their offering are improving rapidly.
These being said, I am pivoting Amethyst Platform to something new, in another direction.
- Instead of focusing on offering more control, I will now focus on assume more control from the user, so that the process from the user's perspective is simplified.
- Instead of focusing on Docker, I will now focus on code and repositories (under the hood, Docker will still be used, but the users don't really care, as long as it works).
- Instead of focusing on replacing Kubernetes, I will embrace it. I already know how to use Kubernetes and I will leverage it to build the platform.
If you made it this far, let me think what you think!
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Are you building something like sloppy.io ? It's hassle free docker hosting. A friend is using it, but it is making me angry some times. Like the file uploader ist just bad :D
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Try mogenius.
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Hmm it looks pretty close to what I had in mind. Only that I want to go for an usage based pricing and more focus on developer experience (with configuration as code, similar to Kubernetes' YAML files).
I had no idea about these guys and gals, thank you for pointing them out to me!
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i only know them from a friend who uses them for his agencys projects. I think its a small german company, don't know if they are active in those communities, never heard of them before, too. I am still using good old VPSs ;) but will gladly check out Amethyst Platform, when its ready ;)
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Hi @vladcalin! I've took a look at this product and few lines that I've observed and might be helpful for you in terms of feedback.
- I get the idea pretty clear from the homepage messages, honestly I'm not attracted by the color theme.
- I think that it would be useful to add an interactive calculator on the pricing section, probably a slider would work. Just to be cristal clear how much it will cost a user/month or year.
- I'm currently using Netlify with Bitbucket integration for my apps, it would be nice to have a comparison on how this app is different than other similar apps ?
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Kubernetes is low level and complicated, but it has also "won" and become ubiquitous. I think a PaaS that a developer could deploy on their own Kubernetes cluster to simplify the development / CD workflow while still being able to fall back on the flexibility and power of Kubernetes for workflows / services that fall out of the general web app space could be huge and something I've wanted for years. A lot of people have made awkward attempts at this and failed but I still think it's a huge, achievable opportunity.
Offering a service that hosts the Kubernetes cluster defeats the whole point of it because then the user is not in control and is locked in to the vendor / solution. At that point, there is no difference between that service and any other PaaS like Heroku.
We launched the first version of the landing page, prompting users to leave an email if they are interested in our product. We are yet to redirect enough traffic on it (right now we only have very unqualified leads from friends and family who do not represent our target customer base anyway) to get any leads.
In the next weeks:
- we will work to make the value proposition clearer.
- move towards presenting ourselves as a "Container deployment platform" rather than a "Container orchestration platform".
- drive more traffic to the website by engaging with people on relevant channels (we will focus on Reddit first and Twitter).
- implement some more key features before launching the product.
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