The Rise of Developer Infrastructure
My name is Sagar Batchu CEO & co-founder of Speakeasy, a VC-backed dev infra startup. We’re on a mission of democratizing access to best in class developer infrastructure for APIs. If you are interested, please get in touch, we'd love to hear from you! We’re building out a great founding engineering team!?
We have a theory about what’s going on with developer infrastructure:?
What is Dev Infrastructure
Dev infrastructure can be a bit of a fuzzy gray area, but we define it as the tooling which forms the connective tissue between your application code and your cloud primitives. Your cloud provider defines the limit of what’s computationally possible, your application code determines the particular what you’re focused on, and your developer infrastructure determines how quickly you're able to get your application code running in production and how well you can maintain it atop primitives from your cloud provider.?
When it comes to sustained innovation in software development, good developer infrastructure is the secret weapon that gives the best companies a head start on their competition. It’s not often talked about because it’s often not the shiny apps your customers use, but it is critically important to velocity and quality . Developer infrastructure is a lot like public infrastructure: when it’s working well you forget it’s there, but when it’s not working, you’ve got yourself a major problem.
Over the last 10 years, developers at smaller companies have struggled to balance developing innovative apps while also managing the complexity of the cloud. Meanwhile, companies like Uber, Airbnb, Stripe, Netflix et al. have been able to invest heavily to build up in-house platform teams, which supports the continued productivity of their application developers. Some of the developer infrastructure those teams created were shared publicly. Two well knowns that I’ve personally adopted in high scale settings are:?
Each of these was enthusiastically adopted by the developer community. At the time of their release, they each represented massive improvements over the status quo.??
Yet, this wasn’t the end of the story. There were some issues. First off, it wasn’t sustainable for devs to continue to rely on larger companies sporadically open sourcing their tools. Increasingly ambitious business growth targets meant that devs needed consistent innovation of tooling to enable them to build more, faster. And more importantly, the tools had been developed by large organizations with huge dedicated platform functions; they weren’t optimized for application developers operating at a smaller scale without robust dev ops support. Simply stated, though the tools were powerful, they lacked a great dev experience. App devs were still having to go down the dev ops rabbit hole, spending far too much time trying to figure how to secure, deploy, and maintain their applications.
Who Will Build the Future of Dev Infra
The way developers interact with the cloud is undergoing a profound shift, Erik Bernhardsson described it well in one of his recent blog posts, “Storm brewing in the stratosphere”. The last 10 years were the initial phase of the cloud movement - shifting your compute and storage from your own server racks to those maintained by a commoditized public cloud. Now we are in the early days of the second phase - the abstraction of the cloud in order to undo the productivity loss caused by dev ops being splattered across the stack. We are pushing towards a future where every App and API dev will launch their product by focusing on the application primitives while maintaining the benefits of public cloud elasticity.?
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That’s why we’re beginning to see the paradigm start to shift. As the cloud has matured, we are now beginning to see the development of dev infra atop the underlying cloud primitives. Some of the biggest drivers for this shift are:
Cloud platforms rooted in developer productivity have seen rapid growth in the last few years. One of my favorite dev ex innovations recently is PlanetScale’s Rewind feature. A mention of database migrations can invoke anxiety in the most battle-hardened devs. Commit a stateless SQL file to manage a production database? No thank you! Another noteworthy mention is Cloudflare open sourcing their Workers runtime - Devs can now deploy fullstack apps serverless-ly on the edge with just a click and with full transparency, amazing ! As this trend continues, the leverage of each developer will soar. For the majority of teams, dev ops will be a distant memory. We’re approaching the inflection point.
What Makes Great Dev Infrastructure
Companies like PlanetScale and Cloudflare are at the tip of the iceberg. The community of independent dev tool companies has really begun to blossom in the last few years. The cloud providers commoditized access to secure, reliable, scalable server capacity, This, in turn has provided the foundation required for dev infra companies 100% focused on building tools with a great dev experience to be viable.
As to what constitutes a great developer experience, it’s still early days so there aren’t many resources. However, when we’re building our tools, we grade our work against our developer experience pyramid:
Dev Infrastructure:
Cloud Infrastructure (These are table stakes!)
We constructed this pyramid based on our experience working on enterprise software, and the things we valued in the tools we used. We would love to hear from other developers to see if this is in line with what they think is important. Are there things we’ve missed? We’d love to know.?
The future of dev infra is bright, and we look forward to making our contribution. For any devs who want to pitch in and help us build great infra for the developer community, please check out the job board. We would love to hear from you!
Sales Leader | Driving Revenue Growth in HRTech & SaaS | Enterprise & Startup Expertise | Team Building
1 个月Sagar, thanks for sharing!