Software development company Massdriver Inc. is developing a platform that helps DevOps teams abstract away infrastructure so that it can be deployed without cloud expertise, thus allowing developers to get back to coding.

Cory O’Daniel, chief executive of Massdriver, co-founded the company in 2021 alongside Chris Hill and Dave Williams in 2021. Their goal is to provide developers a platform designed to help them deploy their cloud infrastructure with a visual interface.

“Williams and I were working on a side project and we got into an argument about who was going to do the operations work,” O’Daniel told Techcrunch. “Here we were, two seasoned ops engineers with more than 15 years experience each in cloud operations, arguing over who was going to have to do the grunt work.”

When it comes to software development, everyone on the development team wants to be the rockstar developer and nobody wants to be the grunt engineer. This is the nature of modern DevOps, where development teams have been melded together with operations into continuous pipelines from development to deployment.

This puts a great deal of pressure on teams to pay attention to testing, deployment and production workflows and this can distract developers from the one thing that they want to do the most: producing new code.

Massdriver’s platform allows customers to visually build their cloud infrastructure from pre-built infrastructure bundles including databases, authenticators, cloud integrations and more. It allows them to connect them and compose entire systems across regions or cloud providers based on the team’s intentions.

Observability is built into the system itself. It includes alerting with monitoring and based on pre-set metrics and thresholds for different internal systems. For example, if a database within the infrastructure becomes overloaded, it will have an alert attached to it that will trigger and pop up a warning right on its node. It doesn’t require hopping out into DataDog or PagerDuty in order to track down an alert thrown into an email or Slack to figure out where it came from.

The system also provides automatic security and compliance with every provisioning run with benchmarks and scanning. Secrets are also encrypted at rest per-row and dynamically injected into applications at runtime to prevent leaks.

“Massdriver enables engineers and IT staff to deliver secure infrastructure faster with guardrails — less worrying about infrastructure, more confident delivery,” O’Daniel said. “Anyone in the org can open the tool and get insights into infrastructure, data services, and applications at a glance.”

The platform includes over 50 different pre-built application and infrastructure bundles built by industry experts with support for Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure and Kubernetes. It also supports both public and private clouds, as well as on-premises setups.

It is also a highly extensible platform designed for developers to get what they want out of it, the company says. If a bundle doesn’t exist and customers want or need something they can develop bundles themselves. Massdriver teams can also design bespoke private bundles and applications.

Massdriver is a Y Combinator-backed company that recently raised $4 million in seed funding. O’Daniel said the funds will be used to build out the product and the company has plans to expand its 11-person workforce in the next month.

Image: Massdriver