Launch HN: Massdriver (YC W22) – Self-serve cloud infra without the red tape

66 points · coryodaniel · 23 hours ago

Here’s a demo video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m6T5p0qXcFE&t=4s

Infrastructure as Code (IaC) workflows were designed to help developers and work fine for small teams, but as organizations scale, they create bottlenecks, complexity, and endless firefighting.

After decades in ops and platform engineering, we kept running into the same problems: brittle pipelines (Terraform variables and input checks don’t catch errors until it’s too late), poor compliance integration (issues are caught during CI/CD, but by then, delays and rework are already inevitable), and a patchwork of tools that developers are forced to learn (Terraform, Kubernetes manifests, cloud APIs), adding more work and turning them into junior devops engineers when they should be shipping value.

We were working on a side project and ended up doing the Spider-Man pointing-meme: two experienced ops guys, neither wanting to touch the infrastructure. We started asking why. The “boring parts” weren’t just boring—they were time-consuming and error-prone, especially at scale. What if we didn’t just automate provisioning but handled all the messy stuff (permissions, compliance, networking, security groups) upfront? That’s when we realized we could encode ops knowledge directly into modules and let developers work off those.

The hard part isn’t just technical, it’s socio-technical. Conway’s Law is inescapable, and nowhere is its impact more painful than at the intersection of development, operations, and cloud APIs. Everyone talks about cloud complexity, but the real challenge is navigating the messy intersection of tools, teams, and processes. Ops teams want control, devs want speed, and compliance creates friction between them.

The traditional answer has been patchwork solutions like GitOps or retroactive guardrails, but these tend to shift complexity around instead of eliminating it. This often results in an ever-expanding CI/CD toolchain, where teams must maintain complex workflows just to enforce policies and validate infrastructure, adding friction rather than reducing it. We think the real challenge is designing abstractions that are simple enough for developers but powerful enough for ops.

Massdriver lets ops teams define reusable infrastructure modules that handle everything: provisioning, permissions, compliance, and cost constraints. Developers don’t write IaC or navigate cloud APIs—they draw a diagram to describe their architecture, and Massdriver provisions resources using those modules. Compliance and security rules are enforced proactively, and ephemeral CI/CD pipelines are spun up automatically. The result: no more brittle pipelines or last-minute guardrails.

How it works:

(1) We turn IaC into functional modules: use tools like Terraform/OpenTofu, Helm, or CloudFormation to create reusable modules with built-in validation, policies, and metadata for visualization and self-service.

(2) Stop pushing IaC code through pipelines: Instead of managing configuration changes in Git repos, create modules as releases—packaged and ready to deploy. Each release bundles both the IaC and policy tooling (e.g., Checkov, OPA), so developers don’t have to copy and maintain separate workflows. These checks are enforced automatically as part of Massdriver’s ephemeral CI/CD process, making it impossible to bypass them.

(3) Self-service with APIs and visual tools: provision infrastructure by interacting with pre-approved modules, without dealing directly with low-level IaC code or brittle YAML pipelines.

Massdriver is live, and we’d love to hear your thoughts on our approach to the IaC problem. If you’re interested in learning more about how we simplify configuration management, check out our demo video—here's the link again: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m6T5p0qXcFE&t=4s

Thanks for reading. We’re excited to hear what you think!