stacker.ie

Stacker follows the Ford model: you can have any colour you like as long as it's black.

Good design is what you leave out. Choosing what to leave out means understanding exactly functionality is needed and why.

A cloud platform is only ever built for a software product, and changes to software source code needs to be carefully managed.

Open source tools for managing source code are standard solutions, so there are lots of third party services which implement them.

You are of course, free to simply install them yourself and use them, which takes time and understanding.

Stacker installs and configures an open source tool then integrates it with a software development life cycle that includes software packaging and distribution within your platform.

By giving up flexibility, you gain a working integration with less service providers.

Stacker has two phases : launch and grow

The launch phase sees the definition of the technical solution, the provisioning and configuration of computation resources. The functionality is reliable but the user interface, such as it is, stinks.

If the version you launch doesn't make you cringe, you launched too late.

The growth phase sees the operation of the product, and these are the next features in the roadmap.

Operating a digital product can be much harder than building one.

Once you've got your solution defined there are lots of other things to consider, and you might only realise that when it's either too late or you're committed to one way of doing things.

Stacker takes a human readable definition of your technical solution and generates code to provision and configure resources on your cloud supplier.

It's opinionated, which means it won't be for everyone, but if you're someone it works for you'll understand your operating costs up front, gain access to open source ingredients and get to decide what your business infrastructure does.

I'll pop in and try to answer questions when I'm not building, if there are any.