There’s a growing need for an integrated software platform that encompasses all components of a modern tech stack -— pre-configured, optimized, and managed hands-off. While well-constructed infrastructure can be a force multiplier for businesses, it also requires numerous moving pieces to integrate smoothly, stably, and scalably. This is neither easy nor cheap to achieve.
Companies want to pay to have their undifferentiated infrastructure problems wholly solved, and an all-inclusive upscale solution would command a good price while standing out in the market. Batteries Included aims to provide this integrated collaborative platform, coupled with automated operations at scale and experienced teams for specialized work. Our goal is to offer a total package that surpasses much of what the cloud and traditional infrastructure teams can provide.
Any Company’s Infrastructure Team
Anecdotally, all tech companies end up with an infrastructure team, whether formally designated or self-appointed. Modern businesses always seem to need lots of the same software, including databases, networking, email, server health, file storage, web servers, etc. This lower-level stack continues to grow more and more complex, with each level building on the hard-won knowledge of engineers, who love the details of bytes, IOPS, hertz, and PPS.
However, these backend systems, while critical, often don’t directly drive business value. Most companies need a database, but few generate extra revenue because they have a marginally better database. The same applies to much of the critical software infrastructure.
Since businesses keep creating the infrastructure team, it has to be instructive of what they really want. These teams are all building a platform to tie all the systems together, then giving that platform to the product-focused or business-focused parts of the company.
How many startup companies around the world are burning VC capital building a login page for ML notebooks? Or a listing page for database backups? Lots and lots of duplicated work that has to be maintained, or worse, break production. These small teams don’t have the resources to dedicate and love every part of the platform.
Tech Leaders
World-class tech companies are investing heavily in their internal tools platforms. It’s their superpower that’s used to move into new markets quickly and turn around struggling acquisitions. Starting the next photo-sharing app at a FAANG is easier because the complex parts are simply an arms reach away. Need scalable storage? Yep, it’s over there. Need fast, easy ML? Yep, easy to build models right this way? Build service, hosting, monitoring… Yep all done already.
Not Hotdog
This superpower directly impacts the startup world all the time. Take the famous hypothetical app Not Hotdog the following sequence is so believable. It seems trite:
- Not Hotdog launches and sees some mild success
- The app continues to trend upwards until it gets an unexpected boost.
- The unexpected traffic starts straining fragile infrastructure
- The startup has to dedicate focus and resources to their internal infrastructure. While small competitor spends this time, the major companies have started their own competitor.
- Either the scaling issues get bad enough, or the FAANG app gains momentum, or building the platform burns enough capital, and this ends up with an early sale.
- The buyer then throws their ready-made and highly funded technology platform, fixes the issue, and rights the ship.
Cloud
The cloud shows that there’s a ravenous market for solutions that make technology easier, cheaper, and more elastic. Many companies are willing to pay large ($332B) amounts to make computing even a small amount easier. ( This is easier? )
However, the cloud’s not easy, far from it. Many teams now dedicate large portions of their time to cloud ops. Instead of making the computing burden easy, the cloud has forcefully subdivided the work and charged more for the privilege of using their software after renting their hardware. The cloud remains difficult, but more practical than any alternative.
Solution
Batteries Included is building a modern technical infrastructure stack and the infrastructure team to back it up. Every part of the platform will be cared for, automatically operating and configuring itself on any customer’s setup. Each and every subsystem should be integrated and work well with each other. No need for hard decisions because our world-class experts have already made those, then automated and integrated everything. We have built all the integrations together with the best user interfaces and the best backend systems. All of this can be offered in an easy-to-use system that hides the complexity of AWS, GKE, or your own hardware.
With Batteries Included, creating a new database doesn’t require learning a new programming language. Simply access the dashboard, click a button, answer straightforward prose questions, and you have a database set up with world-class monitoring and backups. Everything is there because our team delivered better than any other infrastructure team, all in a single scalable package.
We don’t just provide the tools needed today, though. Batteries Included provides the tools that are needed tomorrow. We have a full suite of everything needed to get impact from machine learning. From collaborative software for training production models to deploying and monitoring them, our platform guides users in leveraging technologies like PyTorch, Kubeflow, Spark, and Argo.
This allows your engineers to focus on building the company’s parts that are unique and allows your data scientists to focus on finding new insights for models. All of this is possible because the platform has made it easy to use and share all aspects of the infrastructure, from data storage to networking, logging, and monitoring. Everything is integrated and operated by the best.