After a fair bit of silence, things are moving again for Viamentis. Since my last update, there have been quite a few adventures for me personally, and I even experimented with taking up a job in between. That worked out quite well actually, but I always knew in my heart that I would be getting back to working on Viamentis. I have changed in the meantime, as well as the industry.
People who know me personally would know how passionate I am about free and open source software (and all things open in general) and its potential to change the world for the better. For some reason or the other, I resisted the general trend of Rails developers in moving towards Macs as their primary development platform. Maybe because I have lived through the Microsoft-dominated world, I wasn't ready to give up my hard-won victory of making a living through open source to another company whose vision for computing is a closed one. Either way, I stuck to Linux, and never regretted a moment of it all these years (er, maybe I did when the Linux driver for a piece of hardware tends to be too hard to get working, but thankfully those moments are rare).
And because of my familiarity with Linux platform, I've always had to do some sort of server setup/maintenance or the other in the development teams that I worked with. Perhaps not surprisingly, server maintenance/automation is one of the most frequent types of requests I get from my earlier clients too. Perhaps because of this background, I have always been interested in virtualization. So learning about Vagrant and consequently Puppet have been of tremendous interest to me. I've started playing with them in my free time and using them to deploy and automate bits and pieces at work too (see puppet-solr). Recent tools like Docker are even more exciting.
So when it was time to move on from my last job, I knew exactly what field I would work on: DevOps. Somehow "automate all the things" spoke to my sensibilities and systems thinking. I also think this is an area which gives great dividends for startups and small companies if they do it right. But not everyone can afford a devops team, and usually small teams are heads down in shipping product instead of worrying about their deployment strategy or server automation. I think slightly differently - that if startups and small companies pay attention to devops right from the start, it will accelerate their shipping rate and the developers will be much happier with less flaky production systems. Thats where we come in. Viamentis wants to be the company which enables you reach the market faster, more reliably and that too in a repeatable manner.
So indeed, Viamentis is pivoting into a "devops-as-a-service" company. We want to help you automate your web infrastructure, optimize your developer workflows and monitor your production systems painlessly. If you're interested in our services, please get in touch.