Agile software development was set back by contemporary DevOps. These are strong comments, but Massdriver CEO Cory O’Daniel stands by them. From his perspective, programmers nowadays are often forced to wait for other teams to build code, causing annoying bottlenecks.
DevOps was intended to be processes, according to O’Daniel, who emailed TechCrunch. “It’s ‘waterfall,’ not agile. A waterfall in agile attire is modern DevOps.
DevOps is undoubtedly limited by issues with infrastructure, according to several polls. According to a 2021 survey by CloudBolt, 55% of developers had trouble setting up consistent pipeline settings, compared to 11% who regarded their CI/CD infrastructure to be dependable.
O’Daniel, Chris Hill, and Dave Williams co-founded Massdriver in 2021 as a result of this. The platform from Massdriver is intended to help businesses manage their infrastructure and applications, enabling engineers to build infrastructure without having any prior knowledge of the cloud.
Williams and I got into a disagreement about who would handle the operations duties while working on a side project. We were disputing about who would have to do the menial tasks as two seasoned operations engineers with more than 15 years of combined expertise in cloud operations, O’Daniel added. Prior to joining Container Heroes, O’Daniel worked as the chief software architect at The RealReal and as a cloud solutions architect there. “All we wanted to do was create software that added value for the company. The concept for Massdriver originated here.
Customers of Massdriver choose prebuilt infrastructure “bundles” from which they may link systems using a visual interface across geographies or cloud providers. After deployment, the systems may be checked on from the Massdriver admin dashboard, which also helps coordinate features like automatic status pages and cloud outage monitoring.
O’Daniel underlined that rather than making customers switch between tools like PagerDuty, Datadog, and Terraform, Massdriver’s alarm alerts lead users to a diagram of their infrastructure and highlight the affected components. In addition to the already available support for container registries and DNS administration, continuous deployment functionality will be made available this month.
“We are developing internal developer platforms using a different strategy… We provide a diagramming interface for engineers. They rely on it for the truth. It serves as their onboarding guide for new coworkers. According to O’Daniel, it’s how they controlled and observed their infrastructure. We aim to meet businesses where they are and give them the freedom to choose the right tool for the task.
O’Daniel claims that Massdriver has achieved “well into” six-figure yearly recurring revenue and “mid-80%” gross margin since soft-launching in March. (A gross margin over 75% is regarded as healthy; it is the difference between revenue and cost of goods sold, divided by revenue.) Despite competition from Upbound and Humanitec, the firm manages over 80 compute environments across 35 enterprises with over 100 engineers, and it has plans to double its 11-person staff within the next month.
Massdriver, a startup supported by Y Combinator, just earned $4 million in venture investment. The money, according to O’Daniel, will be used to get beyond the stage of a minimal viable product and “continue to make the product easier for all calibre of engineers to install production-ready infrastructure.”
Engineers and IT personnel can create safe infrastructure more quickly and confidently with guardrails thanks to Massdriver. Anyone in the organization may use the tool and quickly see information about the infrastructure, data services, and apps, according to O’Daniel. “At Massdriver, we want to let engineers engineer so they can concentrate on providing business value, not toiling over configuring commodity infrastructure—and that’s what the C-suite wants, too,” says one engineer.
