Problem: I recently came across a post in an old college group chat that I am a part of for hackers who love to build interesting projects.
Does anyone work for or know small startups that provision dev laptops? E.g. at a big company like FB, obviously all of the laptops are coming with lots of managed software / chef etc., and works very nicely. I figured instead of walking through the dev setup with new hires, it'd be simpler just to do some sort of lightweight setup (e.g. some sort of chef!?!? and/or just a simple startup script). If I could pair that to solve dev issues that people normally have, that'd be amazing too (I'd guess ~10% of our existing dev time is spent on provisioning dev environments).
One tricky thing is we have a lot of folks who are using WSL (or just even straight up windows).
Also, I'll only do this if it's very lightweight b/c of we don't really have the economies of scale (ie not enough devs) for spending a lot of time on devx to be worth it.
My hunch is that this problem (provisioning developer environments at small companies) is actually quite a large problem. In fact MarketsAndMarkets argues that “the user provisioning market size expected to grow from $3.81 Billion in 2016 to reach $7.56 Billion by 2022, at a Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) of 12.2%.” More broadly, this industry is “DevOps” (Developer Operations” and projected by some to be worth $15 billion by 2026. This is especially true of test environments where some of the top problems in 2018 included cost of test environment, defects due to inaccurate configuration, and lack of facilities to manage these environments.
Subscribe here to get access to the first 500 ideas from our blog. For just one coffee a month, you can have access to more than $500 billion dollars of ideas. What's not to love?
Solution: In response to the message, there were quite a few answers:
We've gone from (1) a bash script that installs most stuff, (2) ansible for provisioning new eng machines, and (3) are currently exploring switching all devs to use docker locally, so we can have an identical image pulled down from somewhere
We're a fair bit smaller and haven't needed to graduate beyond a notion doc that tells engineers what they need. (for us it's AWS creds + things that you can install thru brew). For our CI cluster (which we more regularly add / remove / image) we have a bash script
VScode works pretty well connected to a docker instance, you can point your browser at a webserver in your local docker, and you ssh in for anything command line you need
This business would work to create an end-to-end solution that accomplishes most if not all of the things that these hackers described in reflecting on the problem of startup provisioning. Existing competitors in this space include Github’s Codespace, which is currently in private beta, but is designed to allow individuals a way to instantly create within a developer environment hosted in the cloud.
As the software industry grows, I can only imaging that consistent provisioning will continue to be an important issue. According to Evans Data Corporation, today there are 26.4 million software developers in the world, a number that in 2023 is expected to grow to 27.7 million. With software quickly becoming a dominant profession globally, I’ve become more and more intrigued by developer operations startup ideas like this one. What would it take to create a startup-friendly developer environment provisioning tool? This business would attempt to answer that questions.
Monetization: SaaS model via subscriptions.
Contributed by: Michael Bervell (Billion Dollar Startup Ideas)