Main Platform Goals
We have to provide value to customers that show we are more than just a single piece of software installed once. We need to deliver value in an ongoing way. Something tangible and core our customers’ business interests are best, though providing that value to developers in a way that makes them more efficient can be good too. Continued stability and ease of operations would be a tertiary benefit that we can provide.
Business Value
If our tools make it possible to do something that customers couldn’t before, it’s easy to show the value we drive.
- Enable something to scale past a hard limit. For example, we could build a storage platform that will automatically shard and distribute data, enabling datasets of larger than one machine.
- Enabling customers who can’t be in the public cloud to use the S3, scalable load balancers, or other important features of public clouds for the first time.
- Make something faster. Our response times are X% faster on average because of automated tuning, configuration, or operational knowledge built into our system.
Developer Efficiency
Hiring teams of developers and operations people to run infrastructure is expensive. Let us make it possible to run a software business at any scale without huge infrastructure teams. Developers are costly, so making it possible to build things with much smaller teams is a pretty huge thing.
Stability and Operational Excellence
It takes years of really operating ML and distributed systems before you have intuition about the right and wrong way to build infra. So rather than training people for years or competing with the FAANG’s of the world for talent. Let’s build that expertise and knowledge into software. Make doing the right thing default and easy.