Zach Holman

Flightcontrol - Developer-first AWS infrastructure

byโ€ข
AWS has been too intimidating and tedious, causing teams to settle for a simplistic black box PaaS or hiring devops too early. But no more! ๐Ÿ™…๐Ÿผ Our Developer-first AWS infrastructure enables you to use the best AWS services with the easiest possible setup.

Add a comment

Replies

Best
Brandon Bayer
Hey Product Hunt, 21 months after our v1 launch, we're back with v2! Surprisingly, we haven't had to pivot the product at all. The core product we launched is loved by users and has scaled extremely well. The biggest learning has been messaging. We've had several variations including - "Heroku & Vercel are too limiting and expensive. AWS is too complex." - "AWS without Pain" - "The power of AWS. The simplicity of PaaS" But back in August we changed to "Developer-first AWS infrastructure" and that has been resonating way more than anything else we've tried. I highly recommend the books Obviously Awesome (by April Dunford) and Made to Stick (by Chip and Dan Heath) for figuring out positioning and messaging. The second learning is that we've grown very nicely with a really crappy UI and bad design. And that's even in the devtools/DX space where most tools look like the next Apple. So this showed us we are building something truly valuable and that people are using and paying for it not just because it looks pretty. However that has been super hard on my ego lol, I was always embarrassed by our bad design. BUT now with v2 we're introducing our new branding and design. And I'm finally super excited with how it looks and feels. Here's some of the features we've shipped since v1: ๐Ÿš€ Background workers ๐Ÿš€ Redis ๐Ÿš€ Nixpacks support ๐Ÿš€ Preview environments ๐Ÿš€ Deploy from image registries ๐Ÿš€ Build once, deploy many times for single-tenet architecture ๐Ÿš€ Runtime logs & metrics in our dashboard ๐Ÿš€ AWS cost tracking I would love your feedback on the product after you try it! Please ask me anything about the business or product, getting into Y Combinator, raising funding, or how Blitz.js paved the way for this business. :) P.S. I want to give a huge shoutout to rest of the entire team behind this that did all the hard work. From our employees to the design agency Overnice which is the genius behind the brand, logo, and UI/UX design. They've all been absolutely incredible to work with on this.
Mina Abadir
Time flies like spaceships, and I'm excited to introduce Flightcontrol v2 to the world. We've invested a lot of hard work to reach this point. Our goal was to revamp user interactions with Flightcontrol, making it more intuitive and user-friendly. Flightcontrol is the realization of our vision, Brandon's and mine, since its launch last year. It's a step toward our goal of creating a developer-friendly AWS infrastructure that empowers users, even without prior DevOps experience. However, we don't just want to share the product; we also want to share the lessons we've learned. The key lesson for me is "Listen to your users." Flightcontrol v2 is not just a beautiful design; it's the result of collaborating with our users, understanding their pain points, and simplifying their experience. And this is just the beginning. We have exciting ideas in store for our users. Customers are at the core of Flightcontrol. We consider ourselves an extension of each team we work with. We're not just a service provider; we're a team that enables success. Our aim is to make every interaction with Flightcontrol enjoyable and bring a smile to our users' faces. We believe in the butterfly effect: if we can make a developer happy, they will create a better product and empower the world. We want every developer to feel comfortable when deploying software. Infrastructure should not induce stress but should be a source of enjoyment. Join us on this journey to redefine how infrastructure deployment should be for developers. ๐Ÿš€
Siddharth Suresh
It has really been an incredible journey to be a part of 2.0 launch of Flightcontrol and being able to collaborate with such an amazing team โœจ I have been a part of the team for the past 6 months as an intern. The amount of learning opportunity and creative freedom encouraged cannot be understated. Being a student, the opportunity to be able to contribute and to see the final product after working on its various moving parts has been a blast! Iโ€™m really excited to be a part of this team ๐Ÿš€!
Tammo Mamedi
Whatโ€™s up Product Hunt and welcome to Flightcontrol! Thereโ€™s no reason handling something as monstrous as AWS shouldnโ€™t be fun. It certainly was fun getting all the spaceships in there. No blood, no tears but a whole lot of sweat went into everything from finding the right font to tweaking the UX with early feedback. As a part of Overnice studio, I have to say: Flightcontrol has been the most amazing partner, creating this spacey brand and spacious UI/UX we can now finally release. โš ๏ธ Please bombard us with feedback and nitpick on all the bugs we couldnโ€™t fix pre-launch. Weโ€™re gonna catch them all โš ๏ธ Itโ€™s rare to find a company that amazing at juggling hard work and ambition with simply being goodhearted and mindful people. A huge shoutout and a big thank you to the girls and boys of Flightcontrol. It's been a hell of a flight
William Madden
I'm excited to share the launch of the new Flightcontrol ฮฉ2.0! Joining this team for the past 6 months has been an incredible journey, filled with new experiences and lots of learning. Stepping into the frontend tech lead role here was a challenge for me, and truly fulfilling. Part of my job was to help shape the tech side of our product to match the team's big dreams. Between the ambitions of the founders, Mina and Brandon - to make AWS a delight - and the sophistication of the Overnice team's designs, we really had our work cut out for us! And seeing our dreams turn into the sturdy, scalable, beautiful product we're introducing to you today is really rewarding. But our success isn't only about the software. We've watched our team grow, adding new skills and getting better as they developed this new version. Everyone's commitment, creativity, and passion have been really impressive. I feel lucky to work with such skilled people. The release of v2 marks a big moment for us, but trust me, we've got a lot more planned. Each problem we've solved has set us up to take on bigger things, discover new ground, and push our limits. Every piece of code, every brainstorming meeting, and every fixed bug has led to this awesome software that we're proud to present. Curious to know what you think about Flightcontrol 2.0! Your feedback, ideas, and suggestions are welcomed. We're preparing for this new chapter with a strong determination to keep getting better, being creative, and making it more valuable for users. Thanks to everyone who helped out on this project and put in the hard work to make it happen, especially the Overnice team for their fantastic designs. Strap in, folks. This ride is just getting interesting!
Julian Bauer
Can managing infrastructure be joyful? Oh hell yes, it can. I genuinely believe that we've built a product here that will save hours of frustration for everyone who has to manage infrastructure, and hopefully turn it into something fun and enjoyable. What a ride! Really proud of what the team achieved this last year, and even more proud of this amazing collaboration between Flightcontrol and Overnice. Shout out to @flybayer @abadir_ and team for the courage to do things differently, and a big thank you for the trust they put into us. Who would've thought we'd be able to get AI-generated spaceships into a serious product?! Can't wait to see where we go from here! Until then: Be part of the journey by hitting us with UX/UI, design and brand feedback ๐Ÿš€
Blake Bayer
This has been an awesome and challenging project to work on, and it's been really cool to see the product design grow from the MVP to a polished offering! I've been working at Flightcontrol for about a year and a half now, and everything feels so much different from the beginning. Growth is exciting When I started this product, I was a junior, but during the course of this work, I've been promoted to a mid-level, and it's been a blast. There's a high degree of autonomy in the company, and I feel that my ideas and feedback are respected despite having less experience on the team. There's been plenty of opportunities to step up as an engineer and an employee, and I've loved that. It's great to see the finished product- sometimes I spend so much time behind the scenes that I forget what it all looks like, and I'm blown away by just how cool it actually is when I use it. Even with this new release, there's still so much potential out there, and I'm excited to be a part of this rocket ship! ๐Ÿš€
Reyna DeLogรฉ
Greetings, Product Hunt, Iโ€™m thrilled to share a slice of the behind-the-scenes craftsmanship that has gone into the making of Flightcontrol v2. In spearheading the creation of our UI library, my focus was on embodying a complex design system that could tackle the multifaceted demands of our product. This wasn't just about choosing the right tools; it was about crafting a foundation that would allow our design language to scale with elegance and efficiency. Through this process, we constructed a series of interconnected components that translate intricate design into a cohesive library, ensuring a seamless user interface that is both consistent and maintainable as our product evolves. One of the highlights from my end has been developing those sleek and intuitive Metric Charts. These charts are more than just visual tools; they are a gateway for our users to effortlessly manage their AWS services directly within Flightcontrol, bypassing the need for the AWS console. Itโ€™s about making the experience less about navigating through AWS and more about simplicity and clarity. The result? A series of beautiful, responsive graphs that offer real-time insights without the clutter โ€” crafted to enhance our userโ€™s interaction with their infrastructure. As we unveil Flightcontrol v2 and our new website, Iโ€™m excited for you to experience these features firsthand. I can't wait to hear your feedback to make the product even better for you Hereโ€™s to building tools that donโ€™t just work well but also feel good to use ๐Ÿš€๐Ÿš€๐Ÿš€
Boris Tane
It's a pretty interesting proposition. I like the idea of bringing together developer experience of typical PaaS but in my own AWS account. I have a few questions, I hope you'll be able to share on this :): - Would this enable me to deploy a container as easily as I would on a traditional PaaS? - What are the timelines for the serverless offering? - How configurable is an application deployed with Flightcontrol? - if I deploy an app with Flightcontrol, do I have access to all the knobs in AWS? - Is it possible to get a Terraform file from Flightcontrol? The product looks fantastic and I'm rooting for you!!
Brandon Bayer
@boristane good questions > Would this enable me to deploy a container as easily as I would on a traditional PaaS? Yes, you don't need any prior knowledge of AWS > What are the timelines for the serverless offering? We're hoping to ship Lambda early next year, but let's see. In the meantime we support Fargate which is serverless containers. Many times find Fargate easier to manage than Lambda for the reason that monoliths are easy to develop and reason about than microservices. They both have their place of course.
Brandon Bayer
@boristane > How configurable is an application deployed with Flightcontrol? - if I deploy an app with Flightcontrol, do I have access to all the knobs in AWS? You have access to all the knobs in AWS. This is really good because if we don't make something easy from our side yet, it's still possible in AWS. And we can help do the custom stuff if you need. > Is it possible to get a Terraform file from Flightcontrol? No, we don't use Terraform or Opentofu. We use CloudFormation to create the initial stack, and after that we surgically update the AWS console. We will be adding a terraform provider though, so you can manage Flightcontrol config from Terraform.
Mina Abadir
@boristane @flybayer Boris, in addition to those answers, I believe a first hand impression will be so invaluable. So you can get a sense of what is possible. If you like, I am happy to support you with the initial setup, ping me on Discord, and will get you started.
Roger Oba
This looks amazing! Great visual identity, clear value proposition, and well organized information throughout the website. The only thing I was a bit confusing was the pricing plans: I understand that in the free plan we have to pay for the AWS bill, but what about the other plans? You charge e.g. $50/service, but on top of that am I also responsible for paying for the AWS bill? So it's $50/service/month for the convenience of not having to manage AWS (basically, $50/service/mo instead of paying a DevOps guy)? :) Do you offer guidance for those who are not familiar with the infrastructure itself, or does your service requires the user to know what infra they'd like to set up and only helps with setting it up? (Because there are multiple ways to achieve similar results, with difference security policies, different access, diff resources, etc.)
Brandon Bayer
@rogeroba thanks!! And yes, you have that exactly right on the pricing. Btw, we also have a 50% startup discount program for new companies. Flightcontrol is easy enough you don't need any previous knowledge of AWS. The project setup flow has a number of presets like Next.js, Rails, Laravel, etc that help you set up the basics. And then infra that is set up is best in class security, performance, etc. And the last fallback is we aim to provide the best support in the industry to provide any help one needs.
Roger Oba
@flybayer ahh I see! That's awesome ๐Ÿ˜ thanks for the prompt response and congrats on the v2.0 launch!
Mina Abadir
@flybayer @rogeroba Hey Roger, happy to help you setup something on Flightcontrol and get you up and running so you get first hand impression on how it all works. You can ping me on Discord.
123
Next
Last