This week, we had the opportunity to speak with Khash Sajadi, the CEO and Co-founder of
Cloud 66. We addressed the history of Cloud 66, how has the company evolved, and how does he envision the future of the industry.
Please present Cloud 66 to our audience.
Cloud 66 is a DevOps as a Service company. Our products help software teams to build their infrastructure and deploy their applications without the need for DevOps engineers.
Please describe the story behind the company: What sparked the idea, and how has it evolved so far?
We started Cloud 66 as an App Store for data centers. In the first version of this app store, we had about a dozen apps and one of them was an app to deploy a Rails application to any cloud provider. After our public launch, we saw that this app was gaining a lot of tracking amongst our customers, so we dropped the original idea and pivoted to focus on building the best deployment tools we could for our fellow developers.
As part of our growth, we joined TechStars in Texas and raised investment from a wide range of incredible investors around the globe.
What is the mission of Cloud 66?
Our Mission is to Make Developers More Productive.
We love the idea of building a community that helps developers to create, launch, and expand their startups. We’re a profitable, privately-owned company. Since 2012 we’ve helped tens of thousands of developers deploy more than 3 billion times. Developers can expect our products to be always on their side and help them along the way as they build and grow their own business.
What services do you offer?
Today we offer three main products:
- Cloud 66 for Rails – lets you deploy your Ruby on Rails (or any other Rack-based) applications to any cloud. Cloud 66 for Rails offers ease of management and reduces the load on your DevOps resources.
- Cloud 66 Maestro – is a container-based PaaS. It’s what Heroku could have been. You use Maestro to build your applications into containers and then Maestro builds the servers and systems to run and scale your application for you. Maestro is backed by Kubernetes but you don’t have to learn anything about Kubernetes and how to operate it if you don’t want to.
- Cloud 66 Prepress – is a static site publishing tool. It generates static web pages (usually known as JAMStack, like Gatsby, Jekyll, or Hugo) based on the automatically detected framework with full logs and deploys them to the supported cloud providers (AWS, GCP, Azure, DigitalOcean, Linode, and Hetzner).
Who are your typical customers, and what do you think is the main challenge that your product solves for them?
Our customers are typically from 2 sectors:
- SaaS companies: these companies use our products to build and manage the servers that power their application for their customers or deploy their applications for each one of their customers in a single-tenanted manner. SaaS companies save a lot of money by using our products instead of hiring DevOps teams or hiring external consultants.
- Software development agencies: Agencies usually use our products to deploy their work onto their client’s cloud account and have a single management plan for all of their clients. Agencies can reduce their work complexity and cost by using this single management plane for all of their clients and eventually handover the keys to the deployments to the client.
How do you envision the future of your industry?
Over the course of the past 8 years since our inception, we’ve seen a lot of technologies come and go. From containerization and its related technologies to various open-source projects that are no longer around.
We’ve also seen the power of building tools that empower developers to take control of their infrastructure without having to jump through the hoops laid out by operations teams.
We believe regardless of technology, be it containers to serverless, making the cloud accessible and usable to developers is the key to opening new possibilities and unleashing further innovation in our industry and we cheer for any tool, project, or company that’s working to this aim.
