Go with the?FL0!

I’m excited to see today’s FL0 launch on Product Hunt and the great reception & feedback the team has received so far. I thought it would be useful to share my own context on why I think the FL0 team is on an interesting product path (and have recently signed up to be one of their advisors!).

I first met Dale Brett , CEO and of co-founder of FL0, about two years ago when he reached out asking for developer feedback on a new low code software development tool his team was building. I saw an early prototype of FL0, heard the voice of experience, and felt like the team had a genuine interest in improving developer productivity by trying to maintain a state of Flow for backend engineering. FL0’s platform was aiming to provide “low code” infrastructure (I suggested “flow code” might be a great label!) which would free developers from repetitive tasks and accelerate deployment speed, quality, and scaling.

I later met Ryan Thomas , CTO and co-founder of FL0, and gained an even better appreciation of the depth & breadth of technical experience, vision, and focus in the founding leadership team. The founding team has decades of collective experience from companies such as Atlassian, Snap, Google, and Microsoft. They were very aware of the highly competitive landscape and challenges, and carefully testing & validating their product roadmap.

The FL0 platform has evolved significantly since inception based on customer feedback, team vision, and some of the rapid improvements in accessibility of AI and machine learning. Many of the individual ingredients of FL0’s platform recipe have been seen previously. Heroku established the Twelve Factor App methodology and conceived Buildpacks for creating reproducible environments; there are many companies offering Git-based or Docker-based deployments; and, of course you can invest your time in building and deploying environments on the cloud hyperscalers like AWS, Google Cloud, and Azure. Orchestration and scaling with Kubernetes is increasingly common.

However, managing and scaling deployments typically requires a significant investment in time and knowledge, and most platform interfaces are more oriented towards deploying infrastructure than applications. In my own experience, “simply deploying” an app to an in-house Kubernetes service involved a confusing journey through multiple services: set up a project namespace, deploy your Docker container from Quay images using a Helm chart?—?and don’t forget Prometheus monitoring, Splunk logging, secret management, etc. All of these interconnected dependencies are ultimately better than the roll-your-own alternatives and understandable, eventually?… but deployment and troubleshooting still requires full stack DevOps knowledge.

FL0 is crafting an approach oriented around applications and developer workflow:

• You create a new FL0 project.
• You connect a GitHub repo branch (private or public) to a FL0 application and choose a deployment region. Each application has associated environment variables (including secrets), logs, metrics, and configuration options like scaling. The FL0 platform’s build system automatically detects how to deploy your application in a Docker container.
• You can optionally choose to create a Postgres database (which is powered by Neon’s multi-cloud Serverless Postgres). This is Postgres with amazing extras like autoscaling and vector search.
• Wait a minute or two and your deployment will be live. If there are any issues with your deployment, FL0bot (an AI chat bot) will provide helpful diagnostic suggestions and likely solutions.

Without needing to know details about the underlying infrastructure (containers, orchestration, security, monitoring,?…) deployed apps and databases can be:

• Automatically redeployed based on new commits to a selected deployment branch.
• Automatically scaled based on resource boundaries set for a deployment environment.
• Securely shared with other workspace or project collaborators.
• Easily re-deployed from a Development environment to a Production environment.

Although FL0 is only just getting started, they are already solving some developer productivity issues that are real pain points. I’m particularly excited by the evolution of their AI-informed diagnostics and the relentless focus on developer flow that minimises context switching. The team has some great things in the pipeline (APIs, CLIs,?… ).

I encourage you to give FL0 a try (there's a free tier to get you started!).

Please share your feedback with the team?—?join the FL0 Community & Support Discord and say hell0!