Our Path Forward, Stateful for CloudOps • Stateful

It’s been a while since we posted our hello-world about Stateful as a company, and after a twisty-tourney startup journey we have fully committed to our new mission and we're excited to share it.

TL;DR

We pivoted, built runme.dev (interactive DevOps workflows), dug into the challenges of providing self-serve cloud resources and built a product to help cloud ops teams through the process. Our north star is to assemble an integrated environment designed for operators and provide the commercial platform to make it stateful. We see exciting opportunities ahead! 🚀

Journey

In April of 2022, we pivoted away from developer metrics and started exploring the dynamics that made building our metrics app/stack particularly challenging. There's been an incredible amount of progress made in the shift-left / push-build-deploy automation process, but we were struck by the constant friction and frustration that remains when building apps that depend on public cloud resources. It's shockingly normal for teams to regularly spend hours on zoom copy & pasting commands from outdated wiki pages into form fields buried deep in cloud interfaces, just to get basic dev environments back into a working state.

Exploration lead us to the development of runme.dev (runnable README's), an open source project conceptually inspired by Jupyter notebooks that is designed to consolidate operational know-how into structured, human accessible DevOps workflows. The technology is built as a superset of Markdown, available as VS Code platform compatible notebooks, but also in the form of a CLI that can also be used in pipelines. We believe ops “docs” should live in the repo and enjoy all the benefits of GitOps. Runme is an incredibly cool and growing toolchain, and is easily the best way available to codify and share ops process.

Also, after talking to 100's of DevOps engineers and leaders we learned that ops teams are working hard to move to a model where cloud resources can be safe, but self-serve. Relying on dev teams to manually copy-paste kubectl commands from wiki pages or to build and maintain custom DX CLI tools is far from an ideal approach. So in addition to the benefits of Runme, we are taking CloudOps to the next level by making these notebooks collaborative.

By doing this, we're able to provide a complete solution for teams:

a better system for troubleshooting broken notebooks
fast and accurate search to easily find and launch workflows
visibility into the usage and efficiency of the knowledge base
the ability to enable unobtrusive lightweight auditing
an intuitive way to define .ENV requirements and resolve config/secrets

The Stateful platform takes the pain inflicted by the CloudOps work that falls between the cracks (bash scripts, Markdown junk draws, tribal knowledge) and transforms it into a superpower for engineering.

Next

Ultimately, operators need an integrated environment (think IDE, but for DevOps), and their organizations will benefit immensely from connecting that "IEO" in a way that transforms all that know-how into a dynamic operational knowledge base. Think about the efficiency opportunities, not to mention the risk mitigation of making all that process and insight easy to find, maintain and put into action.

We believe there's a big exciting opportunity in front of us and we’re looking forward to working with our design partners to evolve the product experience. If you’re interested in working with us, I would love to hear from you.

Learn more at runme.dev, and stateful.com. Thanks for reading!

Adam