I'm a solo founder who's been hacking away on Codemason for awhile now. I built it to scratch my own itch after falling in love with Docker but also getting frustrated with how much effort getting things set up “right” required.
I’ve really tried to focus on simplifying the entire pipeline from development to production. I think I’ve done a reasonably solid job on that so far but would love some feedback or suggestions for how I could take it further.
Providing hands-on one-on-one support via a Slack I’ve setup has become one of my “things that don’t scale” that I’ve really enjoyed adopting and offering to people (even if they aren’t necessarily a Codemason user). If you’re interested in taking me up on that, let me know (here or via ben[at]codemason.io) and I’ll send you an invite.
I have finished building an MVP for my web app and was considering alternatives to host it. My biggest struggle was how to set up a proper CI/CD flow. Consider that I have pretty much zero knowledge about devops.
I asked for help on the Indie Hackers forum and Ben contacted me. It was like a God-sent gift. Now I am days away of launching my own, properly deployed, web app :)
Couldn't recommend this service more!
1. I write some code 2. I git push 3. ??? 4. Somehow my code has been containerized and is running in a cloud?
I think you're missing some logical steps on your homepage, and also a features page that drills down into exactly what you offer (I get the general gist but what are the exact features?) would be necessary.
The workflow is similar to Heroku's except it's all Docker based: 1. Write code, 2. Git push (your code is containerized), 3. Create your app/services via the CLI/UI. 4. Running in the cloud
I'll set some time aside to work on improving the home page and adding a features page -- thanks again!
Question for you: The benefits of using this as a private-Heroku-on-public cloud are obvious, but in the nicest way possible, why would/should I consider Codemason hosting over a large AWS tier provider?
My big focus for Codemason is simplicity, so building hosting into Codemason ("Codemason Servers") was a way to simplify things even further - just click a button and a server is ready to run your app. In the future, I hope to take it even further and let people spin up "sandbox" versions of apps so they can test things out really quickly. Convenience and simplicity is probably the key draw there.
Just as a general comment on the entire space: It's very competitive and there are plenty of solid options but I feel like there's a couple of things that uniquely set Codemason apart:
- Being able to "cluster" servers from multiple cloud providers easily - Autoscaling capabilities on the cloud provider of your choice (e.g. DigitalOcean or Vultr) - A focus on simplifying things from development to production
As the product matures, I'm hoping the focus on simplicity will pay off in differentiating Codemason in an already competitive market
Also, an explainer and demo video would be very useful to understand the product.
I like your idea of explainer/demo video. I think that would go a long way to clarifying the product. What format would be best for that kind of thing do you think? A walk through of the product or something a bit faster pace that clips together previews of each of the main features?