Ed: We are witnessing the rise of the super niche DevOps service. Section.io is about as niche as you get, providing caching and CDN deployment as a service.

While building our soon to be launched News discovery engine I found I could piece together an entire application from pre-built APIs and web services except a couple of the really hard bits, the scalable crawler and the machine learning (which is where the magic is anyway so it should be difficult to replicate).

Having said that there were numerous Crawling and Machine Learning APIs available but the scale we are aiming (millions of sites in real time and 10000s of topics) they were not suitable from a cost perspective or the level of customisation so we had to build our own.

But this section of the stack is relatively easy to deploy as a 3rd party service.

I guess all these guys have to do build a real business is to convince a few hundred large corporates to use their services for their websites and they have a decent business, apparently they are well on their way.

If they can convince a thousand e-commerce sites, they will end up with $1 million + monthly run rate and its a very valuable business with very low churn which is relatively easy to manage compared to a lot of other web services.