CPO Evelyn LaTour talks with console.dev about AutoCloud.
What is AutoCloud? Why did you build it?
AutoCloud is a cloud visibility tool. For enterprises that are running workloads on AWS, Azure and Google Cloud, we’re helping their engineering and DevOps teams maintain visibility into things like security, compliance, spend, and drift with three main features: automated technical documentation, interactive 3D visualizations, and a managed GraphQL API.
Our product is incredibly UX-focused and highly visual, which is uncommon in the world of developer tooling. We use auto-generated diagrams and visuals as the foundation upon which we layer insights and show connections and relationships between services. Our aim is to reduce the complexity and the time to insight by visualizing things that matter to the end-user in a human-readable way. Our grand vision with all of this is to reimagine cloud visibility by creating a new industry standard for visualizing and querying multi-cloud data.
AutoCloud has four founders Tyson, Drew, Chris, and myself. Tyson, Drew and Chris have worked together previously in a cloud consulting company and were helping enterprises with cloud migrations and greenfield projects where they kept encountering the same problem.
These companies didn’t have a core competency in technology and were really struggling to build reliable, secure, and cost-effective cloud infrastructure. They all had super small or completely non-existent DevOps teams. They couldn’t retain good talent and if they were hiring external consultants to come in and help out, things would be fine for a while. Once the consultants left, however, they had no idea how to maintain this infrastructure that had been built for them so it would degrade over time.
With AutoCloud we want to help these types of companies and create a tool that could give any developer with varying levels of knowledge about cloud infrastructure the abilities of a senior solutions architect. Even for the more experienced DevOps professionals, the aim is to make their jobs easier by giving them access to the data they want in the format they need.