DevOps

Section.io – Cache as a Service

Pitch your Startup, , ,

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.

Startup Name Section.io
What problem are you solving? Developed by a team of web engineers that have seen a gap in the market for a self-managed product for controlling caching. Currently most of our users are using section.io for:- Magento and e-Commerce Caching
– Instantly Deploy, Test and Real-Time Stats on Caching
– For projects which require caching separate from the application/project
What is your solution? section.io provides a simple way to spin up and manage a complete Varnish Cache solution for your web application in just a few minutes.
Target Market Developers, Dev-Ops
How will you make money? Subscriptions/Advertisement
Tell us about the market & founders, why is this a great opportunity? http://www.lifehacker.com.au/2014/09/elevator-pitch-squixa/
http://www.smh.com.au/small-business/smallbiz-tech/load-your-website-faster-20141014-1166u2
Founders Names Stewart Mcgrath & Dan Bartholomew
What type of funding has the company received? Bootstrap
Website https://www.section.io/
Twitter Handle @section_io
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BitCalm – Hosted DevOps Backup & Configuration Management for Cloud Services

Pitch your Startup, , , , , ,

Ed: Backing up servers is and always has been a pain in the ass, so this team has found a real problem with a seemingly simple solution.

Although cloud storage systems are usually redundant with multiple copies of data, this will only protect you from outright failure of a VM or instance.

It won’t save you from yourself and the many screw-ups that can happen running infrastructure.

Full or partial data corruption can happen for a variety of reasons not just hardware.

You could accidentally delete an instance yourself, or a malicious or incompetent team member could delete or corrupt data or an instance, you could have a problem with your newly deployed code, virus or hacker either accidentally or intentionally deleting or corrupting your data.

As a guy who in another life spent 24 hrs in a noisy ice cold data centre trying to recover a crashed server I can tell you this happens everyday and yet none of the cloud service providers provide a good solution for this.

Most cloud services don’t automatically provide a proper versioning backup method for each instance, in fact quite the opposite, the Cloud is still a bit of a DYI self service when it comes to backups.

I would go so far to say that backup is considered optional and the existing solutions seem to do a pretty poor job of syncing cloud backups away from the server.

DevOps tools are the latest hot sector, managing remote cloud resources is a real pain, looks like these guys might be onto a good point solution for a market that is willing to pay.

 

Startup Name BitCalm
What problem are you solving? Backup configuration and management for multiple Linux servers is complex and takes a lot of developers’ time.
What is your solution? Bitcalm – SaaS for the super simple server files and DBs backup configuration and management.
Target Market Web-developers
How will you make money? Subscription
Tell us about the market & founders, why is this a great opportunity? We target web-developers as our target market. Currently they have 3 opportunities to solve this problem:
1. Use backup solution, which is provided by hosting
pro: built-in solution, easy to use
con: can’t manage backups for multiple servers, hosted on multiple providers, can’t migrate, keeping backups, just snapshots
2. Find or self-code scripts.
pro: seems like a cheap solution
con: need specific skills, time to set up, time to validate, time to manage, time to support and results in non-convenient and not reliable results.
3. Use enterprise solutions.
pro: –
con: expensive, solves other problems (for big companies)Comparing to these three ways, BitCalm is really life-saving service.
Eugene (CEO) faced this problem himself when he was running his own web agency; at the end of each project Eugene and his team faced the same pain in the ass – backup configuration and its maintenance.As a result he decided to build saas solution to solve his own problem and the same time, solve the problem for millions of indie developers, freelancers and small and medium-sized web-development companies.
Founders Names Eugene Morozov (CEO), Boris Dus (Business developer), Yury Andreykovich (CPO)
What type of funding has the company received? Angel
Website https://bitcalm.com
Twitter Handle @bitcalm
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Screenbeacon – Real Time Monitoring for Visual Web/App Design Problems

Pitch your Startup, , ,

Ed: I am running a number of development projects with numerous coders involved and all of them are working on code which affects the layout of the sites/apps.

Its frustrating as hell when someone changes something, a merge happens and then the site CSS and layout is changed or broken, also when an asset is unavailable ie the CDN is not responding or there has been an image break somewhere so the images are not displaying.

Its even more frustrating when someone else tells me and I didn’t know.

Screenbeacon promises to detect when your sites are not displaying as normal across multiple browsers and devices and alert you and then give you access to the code via Github to review and identify the issue.

You can setup the “normal” view with a Chrome Plugin and then it will monitor for any changed to the “normal” view.

If you own a website/app or are responsible for DevOps its a great idea.

PS. Only thing you guys need to do is provide a Slack.com integration

Startup Name *

Screenbeacon
What problem are you solving? Traditional monitoring services like New Relic are great for monitoring your servers and general availability but miss the issues with visual design caused by down CDNs, bad commits to CSS and HTML, and broken images.
What is your solution? Screenbeacon is an easy to use visual regression testing service. Use our Chrome extension to set up visual integration tests for your website and get notified when something breaks.
Why is this a great opportunity? Catch errors in your visual design before your users do.
Target Market Designers, design leads, and product managers at startups and enterprise tech.
How will you make money? Subscriptions, Advertisement
Founders Names Screenbeacon Team
Website https://www.screenbeacon.com/
What type of funding has the company received Bootstrapped/self funded