Oatfin Under The Hood - Part II
Welcome to another edition of Cloud Musings! My goal with this newsletter is to write weekly on Sunday to reflect and talk about the features we ship weekly, fundraising, customer wins, programs, etc. I publish it on LinkedIn as well. You can subscribe if you want to get updates when I publish new editions.
We’ve been making a lot of progress on the fundraising side. We are currently raising a $3M seed round. Last week, we pitched Precursor Ventures and Mucker Capital. This week, we’re meeting with the team at Morgan Stanley Inclusive Ventures Lab.
I would love introduction to investors who are excited about the cloud and developer tools space. I think what we’re working on has a lot of potential to make the cloud a lot simpler and more developer friendly.
As part of de-mystifying what Oatfin does under the hood, last week I showed what happens when a customer deploys a cloud infrastructure. But I skipped a few steps.
One problem we solve, but didn't think about is managing and sharing credentials among developers. At first, we wanted to simply have the ability to store and show a team's cloud credentials in the UI.
Come to think of it, currently, most teams share these credentials in emails, Slack, wikis, and insecure channels. Uber for example, was recently hacked through Slack.
Another challenge is when a developer leaves a company, there is a rush to remove all access and permissions to critical apps. Often times, it's impossible to know who has access to what.
The solution is pretty simple, but not one we set out to build.
The way we solved this problem is using AWS Secrets Manager to store the actual secrets which are encrypted and secure while using our MongoDB database to store the metadata. As a user, you can give others on your team granular access for a limited amount of time without ever seeing the secrets. You could think of it as a more secure version of 1Password.
We have a ton of exciting things we're working on and definitely looking for feedback. One project, I'm super excited about is building a fully functional local stack that developers can use to test their cloud and server-less apps offline.
Thanks for reading!
Jay