FAQ

What’s the difference between Terraform and NotOps?

Terraform and notops are complementary tools. You'd use notops to create and manage your core platform. And then you'd use Terraform to add any additional stuff you need on top of that core platform.

Both notops and terraform would run from the same CI pipeline. All AWS resources created by notops follow naming conventions and have AWS tags attached. Your Terraform code can query these resources using Terraform data-sources, and build on top of them

Why should I use notops to build my platform instead of Terraform

Imagine you want tacos 🌮

Terraform gives you the flour, veggies, proteins and all the ingredients you’d ever need. Now you need to find a kitchen, find a good chef or two, cook all the ingredients, maybe hire some support staff, and spend time cooking tacos, and experiment until you get the right taste. Not to mention: you have to keep cleaning the kitchen, and prevent it from burning down 🚒

We just serve you the perfect tacos 🌮, with hot sauces 🌶️. You can choose whether you want the fish 🐟, falafel 🧆 or veggies 🥬 . We keep the kitchen clean, and we prevent it from burning down.

Less fun answer

With Terraform, you'll have to learn everything, including AWS services and cloud-native tooling, yourself, and then build, debug and maintain all of that code. With NotOps, we bundle all of it in a cute little CLI.

To elaborate: when you want to build a cloud-native platform, several things have to go right. You'd need

1. To hire the right set of people who are competent with the vast landscape of cloud-native technologies, software engineering, and IaC tools like Terraform.

2. The time to write all the IaC code, debugging it, and making sure it checks all the boxes around security, scalability, maintainability and all the other such *ilies

3. To establish observability environments, and make sure you are running them in a cost-effective without lining DataDog or AWS's pockets

4. To keep your infra and all the services you run updated and patched. Kubernetes gets a new version every quarter. Istio gets a new version every couple of months. So on and so forth.

We bundle all of our hard-earned expertise into a CLI that builds and maintains a platform for you, with industry-leading tools. You can focus on building what your customers need.

What’s the core value proposition of NotOps? Why should I buy it?

The main value is the difference in time and money between (a) hiring a team or consultants to build a platform vs (b) using notops to build and run the platform. The difference is usually in months or years, and millions of dollars for a medium sized startup.

The opportunity costs of not having a reliable platform while you are trying to build a product are high. A reliable platform keeps your customers happy, and keeps your developers happy. We know because we have worked at companies that lost their customers and burned out their engineers because the platform was a shit-show.

The day 1 of your start up, or your cloud journey, you can start running a production-grade platform without having to worry about hiring expensive consultants or scarce platform-engineers who need to keep up with the vast, changing landscape of cloud-native tools, and AWS.

Does notops handle all of my AWS needs?

No. We create the core platform. This includes EKS, VPCs, subnets, NAT Gateways, Load Balancers, TLS, DNS, Service Mesh and so on. It doesn’t include individual services that developer teams may need, like an RDS or an S3 bucket.

See the full list of components we manage here

We provide the platform. You are free to build what you need on top of it.

We need something that notops doesn't support

We are building a core platform for you. You can build on top of that platform. You can modify all the components notops deploys since they are just standard AWS services that you can query and use using any IaC tool like Terraform or CloudFormation.

You can also drop us a line at [e-mail] with the feature you need, and we can figure out how soon we can deliver it for you.

I don't want to use Kubernetes, are there other alternatives?

No. We are building a platform with a specific toolset that we think works for most teams. At the moment, there are no plans to support alternative deployment platforms like ECS, Nomad and others.

We don't like notops and want to stop using it

We'd never do anything that would lock you in with us.

We tag all of the AWS resources we create, and we document all the components we use. If you want to stop using notops, you can import all of the resources into your own Terraform or Cloudformation code, and carry on as if you had never used notops.

You can also drop us a line at [e-mail], and we'd be happy to jump on a call and help you with removing notops. Hopefully, you can tell us why you are unhappy and we may be able to fix your problem.

We are working on additional documentation to make moving away even easier. We are also building an additional command on the CLI to automate importing.