Stateful Public Beta! • Stateful

Hello world,

Today I’m thrilled to announce that Stateful is available as a public beta, free for all engineers and their teams to try! Our mission at Stateful is to reimagine DevOps docs, making them dependable, GitOps compatible, and available as a knowledge base so that engineers can believe in their operational docs again.

TL;DR

Why Stateful?

In today's DevOps world, the status quo for engineering docs is to either put them in a wiki or stash bash scripts in a junk drawer repo, missing much of the important context that makes them useful. This approach is simply not good enough, and we are dedicated to giving engineers a better solution. Jupyter has done an amazing job of making literate programming the chosen paradigm for ML, and we are excited to help engineers see the light and make the move to Notebooks for DevOps. This shift makes it possible to really solve the hard problems about docs.

Acknowledging that new ideas often encounter resistance, we've done our best to make adopting this new docs model easy and seamless. Your existing Markdown library is the starting point for Notebooks; our technology makes them discoverable, runnable, configurable, and collaborative. This approach also aligns with the common engineering initiative of enabling teams to be more self-served.

Runme: Open Source, Open Standards, and Community

Our platform is built on Runme (runme.dev), an open-source, Jupyter notebook-inspired toolchain. Runme lets you write documentation in Markdown, transforming it into executable Notebooks in a VS Code (or VS Code compatible) environment, or TUI. The Notebooks are integrated with cloud-native tools, cloud consoles, and existing DevOps tooling, providing a seamless experience for modern operational practices.

We believe that the solution to today's documentation shortcomings must be addressed through open source and open standards. The technology must stand on its own, regardless of Stateful’s product. Join us on Runme Discord or GitHub to help us grow our community and drive the project to solve more real-world challenges.

Stateful Platform

In today's operational model, most operations are autonomous and isolated, missing the chance to contribute to a shared knowledge base, which limits learning and improvement.

Stateful, our solution, is a wrapper around Runme. It adds authentication, ensures data safety, and integrates with collaboration tools. Stateful indexes the Markdowns from your Git, making them easy to discover, then captures commands, metadata and errors from every Notebook session. This enables continuous improvement in operational processes, unblocking engineering, and accelerating overall performance. By building a shared knowledge base, teams can learn from past operations and enhance their workflows over time.

Features:

Quickly find and launch your Markdown files from Git as Notebooks
Give teams or groups permissions to Notebooks, metadata, and outputs
Share artifacts in Slack channels with the desired context and people
Store with encryption and masking of sensitive information by default
Continuously build a powerful DevOps knowledge base

Stateful excels in mission-critical scenarios:

Finding and executing runbooks during outages
Real-time collaboration for system debugging
Unblocking dev and .ENV setups
Accurate and transparent procedural execution (rollouts, upgrades, etc)
Accessing historical shared peer sessions when they're unavailable

These scenarios highlight the importance of reliable processes and collaboration, making Stateful indispensable for engineering teams.

The Future

We see enormous potential for what we’re doing, including leveraging AI for authoring, secrets & config management, and more integrations with the services and tools engineers use daily. Stateful is free to use, and we are eager for your feedback. Sign up today, set up your integrations, and invite your team. Your input is invaluable to us as we continue to build and refine the platform.

We look forward to building the future of engineering documentation together, thanks for reading.

Adam Christian
Co-founder, Stateful