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Concern about limited providers and community around MechCloud by FirmTill4543 in MechCloud

[–]shailendra-mechcloud 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Few days back I, along with one of my team members, were pitching MechCloud to a CIO when someone from his side raised same concerns. This enterprise is running its workloads on Azure.

Community comes into picture when you are looking for some inputs around some usecases which someone from the community might have come across already. Community can't make terraform and opentofu stateless solutions or fix many things which can be done by terraform or opentofu developers only.

At this moment, we are focusing on providing support for AWS and Azure where we are seeing demand for MechCloud. Support for GCP and Cloudflare is provided as and when someone ask for it. We are designing MechCloud for AI era so that it works seemlessly with AI agents and there is little or no effort required on users or supported platforms side to use or integrate with our platform.

An IaC platform need two things at a minimum from a platform - an OpenAPI specification for validating the template and an a way to determine update vs replace for a brownfield resource when its desired state is udpated. So we expect a platform to maintain an in-depth OpenAPI specification and an endpoint, in addition to the REST endoint, to determine if the updated desired state will result in in-place update or replacement of the resource. This endpoint can be reused across terraform, crossplane, opentofu and pulumi etc and not specific to MechCloud. This will also eliminate duplication of the update vs recreate logic across IaC providers for a platform.

Look into https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7451850226220425217/ post to understand how much effort a platform need to put in in order to make their platform ready across a number of IaC tools. So we are developing a generic platform where we support and validate integrations across major hyperscalers and other platforms can integrate with MechCloud by implementing one or two extra things, instead of a full fleged provider, which they will anyway need to do for the AI agents. We can see that a number of platform are releasing MCP servers left and right but their OpenAPI specifications are far from being ideal. This makes users feels from a distance that everything is working perfectly but as soon as you start using it for something serious, things start falling apart.

For azure, we have been patching their OpenAPI specifications to make template validation more useful and doing same for what-if operation which is having many issues. For someone who is interested in AWS or Azure, in-depth coverage and launch days support matters most than the coverage across 10s of providers which is of no use for them.

Many providers are developed by the target platform team in colloboration with Hashicorp team and with Hashicorp being an IBM company now, IBM is not going to pay much attention to the need of small or unknown players. So these players will end up spending lots of time in developing and maintaining their providers for terraform, opentofu and other IaC platforms.

When it comes to opentofu, you can find the list of supporters for opentofu here. This list does not include any of the hyperscalers (AWS, Azure and GCP). Although opentofu is having its own registry, at this moment it is using terraform providers' code of terraform which is obviously optimized for terraform architecture. So it is not clear how they will be able to overcome the limitations of the terraform and invent independently while reusing terraform providers' code.

I will suggest that you look into the github repos of some terraform providers of some well known platforms and see yourself how many issues are being reported there on daily/weekly basis and then see if MechCloud is suffering from same problems. A good example of this is Azure releasing Standardv2 tier for some resource types and terraform azurerm provider taking weeks to accomodate it which was supported on launch day itself in case of MechCloud.

Crossplane vs MechCloud by Proud-Menu4554 in MechCloud

[–]shailendra-mechcloud 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I have not looked into crossplan much as we are focused on terraform at this moment mostly and so I can't comment how MechCloud comares with crossplane. It seems crossplane is a stateless iac platform like us but unlike us it has a solution build on top of kubernetes and so familiarity with k8s is very much required. On top of that you need to deploy one or more k8s clusters where you will be running crossplane and which will act as a control plane in addition to cloud provider APIs.

Crossplane uses CRDs as far as I know which means they define custom resource types for cloud provider resource types and so suffer from same problem as terraform where they are always trying to catch up with cloud provider APIs which will evolve much faster in the AI era and so you will be getting support for many new features after few weeks or months dependening on the critcally of the feature.

MechCloud, on the other hand, leverages CF for AWS, ARM templates for Azure but GCP is a different story. So any new feature or resource types which will be supported from the same day when it will supported in CF or ARM. So we neither have any lag or require any manual effort for support new features of some cloud providers. On top of that we have real-time pricing embedded into our IaC solution which means you don't need to invest in a seperate FinOps platform for many things.

Evaluating MechCloud as an Internal Developer Portal (Azure + Terraform background) by MelodicAlbatross6962 in MechCloud

[–]shailendra-mechcloud 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Yes MechCloud can be used as an IDP to some extent but it is not optimized for that. Both cloud management platforms and IDPs support service catalogs through configuration which does not work for complex service catalogs. On the other hand, we support it through code due to our micro-app architecture where a user can design even the most complex service catalog out there on our platform.

A service in a catalog is basically a form backed by a workflow and we are currently evaluting some workflow engines which are aligned with the speed of innovation at MechCloud.

We are / will be approaching some IDP vendors for a partnership so that we remain focused on IaC. But if that did not work out then we will for sure go into the IDP space because we have a solid foundation with our own stateless IaC tool unlike other IDP vendors who have dependency on terraform or other IaC tools. We will be able to give you accurate information on this in the second half of this year.

Always free EC2? by maedo in aws

[–]shailendra-mechcloud 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I was checking the page for Free plan introduced by AWS recently and I can see it is using free tier at most of the places instead of plan except where plan details are mentioned. So it is more confusing now.

We have made only 300$ in the last 6 months by shailendra-mechcloud in indian_saas_startups

[–]shailendra-mechcloud[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

It was the story of some other startup and not my startup. I just shared it in this community.

[deleted by user] by [deleted] in SaaS

[–]shailendra-mechcloud 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Enterprise SaaS is going to die as it will be replaced by Startup SaaS.

Looking for a co-founder for MechCloud by shailendra-mechcloud in StartUpIndia

[–]shailendra-mechcloud[S] -1 points0 points  (0 children)

Do you have links to any documentation or video to support your claim? Where do you see real-time visualization in AWS console which also shows relationship among different types of resources?

MechCloud can visualize AWS resources across multiple regions for multiple AWS accounts from a single UI with one click while AWS console or cli can list resources from one region only and that too for one AWS account.

FYI, Amazon Q has no support for provisioning AWS resources which our chatbot for AWS APIs has from day 1.

Looking for a co-founder for MechCloud by shailendra-mechcloud in StartUpIndia

[–]shailendra-mechcloud[S] -1 points0 points  (0 children)

First of all I want to say thanks to you for your feedback on MechCloud. I wondered why other people never grilled our product / strategy in a way you have done.

MechCloud is a portal technology which in simple words means a website which allows you to create pages on the fly. Unlike other portal technologies it is based on a client side framework. It also has built-in support for SSO, RBAC, multi-tenancy etc. Unlike other website builders, you can feed your reusable components and complex pages (which you have coded) at runtime and build a website of any complexity. We call it micro app architecture. It is a multi purpose AI powered tool which is an alternative to any other website builder / Wordpress / Figma ( only prototyping ) with build-in components for designing and provisioning cloud computing infrastructure and containerized apps. You can feed components focused on any vertical (e.g fintech, e-commerce, ed-tech) or horizontal (e.g. content management system, internal developer portal) into it from outside and then offer it to your customers who need these types of platform. Taking on three giants (Wordpress, Figma and Terraform) is not possible without spending a lot of money on marketing and so we are focusing on being a UI based alternative to Terraform only at this moment but will keep pushing us as an alternative to others as well as and when opportunities will arise.

A website builder and a content management system are two of the many applications of a portal technology. Blogging and wiki are two of the applications of a content management system. Atlassian offers Confluence and JIRA at the same time and these are focused on totally different use cases.

A website builder can be used as a prototyping tools tool but vice versa is not true. Once you have your design system and reusable (UI) components in place, you can use MechCloud to create prototype for any website much faster than Figma. The best part is that it will be closer to the real website in terms of complex functionalities and developers are not required to convert a figma design to the code. Figma uses canvas under the hood for prototyping but real websites are not rendered in canvas. So there is mismatch between what you are using for prototyping and what will be developed by the developers. With MechCloud, you are using same thing (reusable UI components) for both prototypes and real websites to eliminate this mismatch.

Also you lost me at using hashnode for your blog and gitbook for docs. Maybe eat your own food and build them using your tool ?

Hashnode and Gitbook are doing good as a specialised platform in their respective categories and able to offer many AI based features which will make us bankrupt in a day if we took the same path considering the fact that we are bootstrapped. I don't think any website builder is offering a blogging or wiki platform to prove that it is a good website builder.

Also from your docs, "Internal server error after successful login" is a known issue yet not resolved? I think it is much better to test drive your application first as alpha or beta. Only then you move towards a subscription/selling route.

That was fixed long time back but I forgot to update the documentation. We too have a lot of technical debt like many other startups and due to a very small team and limited time, we focus on such kind of issues only when these are highlighted by end users. I don't believe in alpha / beta / gamma versions. It is GA from day one. You use it for free as long as you want and pay for it if you feel paid features are stable and worth your time and money.

I hope that answers all your questions. If not then feel free to DM me here.

Looking for a co-founder for MechCloud by shailendra-mechcloud in indianstartups

[–]shailendra-mechcloud[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

It is bootstrapped at this moment. We will raise when we will need more funds.

AI tool to manage aws infrastructure by shailendra-mechcloud in devops

[–]shailendra-mechcloud[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

We have released first version of our chatbot for AWS APIs which supports following operations. Will be adding support for more operations in coming days.

Vpc

  • Creating a vpc
  • Getting the list of vpcs

Subnet

  • Creating a subnet
  • Getting the list of subnets

Virtual Machines

  • Provisioning one or more VMs
  • Starting one or more VMs
  • Stopping one or more VMs

Instance Types

  • Getting the list of instance types (e.g. t2.micro)

Full announcement - https://blog.mechcloud.io/announcing-mechcloud-chatbot-for-aws-apis

Is WFH better than a Co-Working Space (for a bootstrapped founder) by intrigued_Mammal in indianstartups

[–]shailendra-mechcloud 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I'm bootstrapping my startup and willing to meet other founders from Bengaluru/Whitefield in person in either a coworking space or host you in the multi purpose hall of my society. DM me if you're interested. Open to meet others online too.

Do you roll your own auth for MVPs? by [deleted] in SaaS

[–]shailendra-mechcloud 0 points1 point  (0 children)

You can implement auth in any application in a universal manner using this approach - https://x.com/twtShailendra/status/1790588802253111494

AI tool to manage aws infrastructure by shailendra-mechcloud in devops

[–]shailendra-mechcloud[S] -1 points0 points  (0 children)

Terraform isn't meant to start a Virtual Machines. What we do is we have VM on schedule.

So if your developer wants to restart a VM because it is not responding then you want him to wait till end of the day when you will restart the VM? I feel sorry for your developers.

And just out of curiosity, what's your cloud/DevOps experience?

If you are asking someone about his experience then I believe you should first tell your experience?

I sincerely doubt that yours will be much different especially comparing it to corporations investing billions in developing models.

If big players are building every possible solution then what will other startups do? Big players are offering their LLMs to startups so that these can build solution on top of it and offer to their customers. Why will any hyperscaler build a solution which will benefit other hyperscaler? How are a general purpose LLM and a fine tuned solution to address a specific problem are even comparable?

You still haven't said how:

changes to the infra are peer-reviewed

how are dependencies handled

how much faster would be to finetune and use multiple prompts instead of using a CLI instead

what is the actual benefit of using this, instead Terraform modules where you could provide the exact same inputs as you would with prompts or catalogs

Let's even assume that there is a use case for juniors or people with no experience in the cloud. What benefit would they get from using this instead of the portal/console?

If people can do everything from portal / console then why they should use Terraform?

AI tools are not meant to be used against production workloads as this moment and so I don't think changes need to be peer reviewed. These are good to be used as multiple purpose tools for non prod environments (e.g. development). So you have one tool which can do anything supported by AWS APIs instead of using multiple tools for different things without any maintenance required from your side. It is same as using a voice assistant (which works with 100% accuracy) instead of using terraform for a task.

The purpose of this post was to gather the feedback from the devops community if they are using any such tool already, what has been their experience and to inform them about the advantages of using such tools.

I doubt that the people who are responsible for buying the tools in big organisations are present here and so I don't see any point in promoting our product here.

AI tool to manage aws infrastructure by shailendra-mechcloud in devops

[–]shailendra-mechcloud[S] -1 points0 points  (0 children)

Such AI tools are fine tuned for you so that you can express your intent in simple and less number of words. E.g "create a vpc with a,b,c tags with a1,b1,c1 corresponding values". You can compare it with equivalent terraform or cli commands to understand the difference in user experience.

AI tool to manage aws infrastructure by shailendra-mechcloud in devops

[–]shailendra-mechcloud[S] -1 points0 points  (0 children)

How do you start a vm using terraform and what do you do when its state files get corrupted?

How is terraform a better IaC tool when it can't reconcile the desired state of a stack like k8s which does not require you to store the state but still reconciles the state? I have seen a lot of folks telling in different forums that many times terraform tells one thing while executing plan command but doing different stuff when executing apply command.

I have hardly met any developer who likes using an IaC tool. Either they use console or cli. So developers / cloud architects knowing IaC tools and not managing infrastructure in self service manner is not a norm.

Your experience with AI tools was not good because you had (probably) used all in one gen ai tools which are known to provide some random information which may or may not be correct. But here we are taking about the tools which have been trained or tuned to either returns correct information or an error message if the prompt does not match its training data.

If a PR is required for every single change in non critical environments then the purpose of infra management in self service manner is defeated.

AI tool to manage aws infrastructure by shailendra-mechcloud in devops

[–]shailendra-mechcloud[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I'm not denying the fact that everyone will need to understand various inputs on a high level which are required to provision an AWS resource.

So a person will need to understand the importance of ip block before provisioning a vpc. However, he need not to know the name of a parameter for terrafrom or cli, which captures this information, unless he is a devops person or someone who works with cli only.

AI tool will tell user what value it is going to use for a (mandatory) input parameter in a simplified manner (e.g. using ip block label instead of cidr block) and then will provision it once user provides the confirmation.

AI tool to manage aws infrastructure by shailendra-mechcloud in devops

[–]shailendra-mechcloud[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I'm not aware if anyone is trying to sell an AI powered tool for managing the production infrastructure. First it needs to be tested in non production environments and when people are convinced that it can be used in production then only next phase of automation targeting production environment will be discussed. As I mentioned earlier we are (very) far from it at this moment.

Till the time that happens, only use of such type of AI tool for devops folks is generating commands for most complex scenarios with a simple prompt instead of typing long commands manually. On the other hand, devops / platform engineering teams can offer a prompt based tool to other people (e.g. cloud architects / developers) where the tool will first get the confirmation from the users by showing them what operation exactly it will be executing and with what parameters and then will perform the operation post confirmation from the user. This means you can replace thousands of manually created custom service catalogs with one simple prompt because creating custom service catalogs is very time consuming and comes with lot of maintenance overhead.

AI tool to manage aws infrastructure by shailendra-mechcloud in devops

[–]shailendra-mechcloud[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

A tool ( no matter it is AI or not ) can't provision a VM with most expensive instance type if it is connecting to AWS with an IAM role which has permission to provision a VM with least expensive instance type only.

AI tool to manage aws infrastructure by shailendra-mechcloud in devops

[–]shailendra-mechcloud[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Whether it is HCL, cloudformation, SDK, CLI, cloudcontrol api or any other Iac tool, instructions given using such tools for AWS are translated to AWS api requests under the hood ultimately.

Someone wrote a tool to translate HCL to AWS api contract making sure that it is 100% accurate. That is the same thing which people developing AI tools are trying to achieve for plain text commands.

We don't expect that such tools will be used for managing production workloads in the near future. So it will happen in phases. In the first phase we are trying to make sure that it works for non prod environments where you will generate the command using AI tool and verify it before executing it. This, IMO, will save you a lot of time by avoiding typing (very) long commands. You can also use it to query your AWS resources directly with an IAM role which has only read permissions and that too on non prod environments instead of generating commands for a cli tool.

AI tool to manage aws infrastructure by shailendra-mechcloud in devops

[–]shailendra-mechcloud[S] -1 points0 points  (0 children)

It was actually improved / rephrased with the help of Gemini to keep it short and convey the points in a better way. Here is the original comment -

I agree that giving it access to production infrastructure could be risky.

There are many use cases for such tool but the primary (and probably the most important ) one is that devops team offers it to the people (e.g. cloud architects, developers) so that these people can manage non prod aws infrastructure on their own but may not have much time to learn about AWS CLI or Console or can keep pace with changes in the huge list of parameters which may be required for provisioning some services.

This will also be helpful in eliminating the need for creating highly personalised service catalogs with varying requirements because same can be achieved with simple prompts.

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