Flightcontrol — Developer-first AWS infrastructure

Hey Product Hunt, 21 months after our v1 launch, we're back with v2! Surprisingly, we haven't had to pivot the product at all. The core product we launched is loved by users and has scaled extremely well. The biggest learning has been messaging. We've had several variations including - "Heroku & Vercel are too limiting and expensive. AWS is too complex." - "AWS without Pain" - "The power of AWS. The simplicity of PaaS" But back in August we changed to "Developer-first AWS infrastructure" and that has been resonating way more than anything else we've tried. I highly recommend the books Obviously Awesome (by April Dunford) and Made to Stick (by Chip and Dan Heath) for figuring out positioning and messaging. The second learning is that we've grown very nicely with a really crappy UI and bad design. And that's even in the devtools/DX space where most tools look like the next Apple. So this showed us we are building something truly valuable and that people are using and paying for it not just because it looks pretty. However that has been super hard on my ego lol, I was always embarrassed by our bad design. BUT now with v2 we're introducing our new branding and design. And I'm finally super excited with how it looks and feels. Here's some of the features we've shipped since v1: 🚀 Background workers 🚀 Redis 🚀 Nixpacks support 🚀 Preview environments 🚀 Deploy from image registries 🚀 Build once, deploy many times for single-tenet architecture 🚀 Runtime logs & metrics in our dashboard 🚀 AWS cost tracking I would love your feedback on the product after you try it! Please ask me anything about the business or product, getting into Y Combinator, raising funding, or how Blitz.js paved the way for this business. :) P.S. I want to give a huge shoutout to rest of the entire team behind this that did all the hard work. From our employees to the design agency Overnice which is the genius behind the brand, logo, and UI/UX design. They've all been absolutely incredible to work with on this.

Can managing infrastructure be joyful? Oh hell yes, it can. I genuinely believe that we've built a product here that will save hours of frustration for everyone who has to manage infrastructure, and hopefully turn it into something fun and enjoyable. What a ride! Really proud of what the team achieved this last year, and even more proud of this amazing collaboration between Flightcontrol and Overnice. Shout out to @flybayer @abadir_ and team for the courage to do things differently, and a big thank you for the trust they put into us. Who would've thought we'd be able to get AI-generated spaceships into a serious product?! Can't wait to see where we go from here! Until then: Be part of the journey by hitting us with UX/UI, design and brand feedback 🚀

Time flies like spaceships, and I'm excited to introduce Flightcontrol v2 to the world. We've invested a lot of hard work to reach this point. Our goal was to revamp user interactions with Flightcontrol, making it more intuitive and user-friendly. Flightcontrol is the realization of our vision, Brandon's and mine, since its launch last year. It's a step toward our goal of creating a developer-friendly AWS infrastructure that empowers users, even without prior DevOps experience. However, we don't just want to share the product; we also want to share the lessons we've learned. The key lesson for me is "Listen to your users." Flightcontrol v2 is not just a beautiful design; it's the result of collaborating with our users, understanding their pain points, and simplifying their experience. And this is just the beginning. We have exciting ideas in store for our users. Customers are at the core of Flightcontrol. We consider ourselves an extension of each team we work with. We're not just a service provider; we're a team that enables success. Our aim is to make every interaction with Flightcontrol enjoyable and bring a smile to our users' faces. We believe in the butterfly effect: if we can make a developer happy, they will create a better product and empower the world. We want every developer to feel comfortable when deploying software. Infrastructure should not induce stress but should be a source of enjoyment. Join us on this journey to redefine how infrastructure deployment should be for developers. 🚀

I'm excited to share the launch of the new Flightcontrol Ω2.0! Joining this team for the past 6 months has been an incredible journey, filled with new experiences and lots of learning. Stepping into the frontend tech lead role here was a challenge for me, and truly fulfilling. Part of my job was to help shape the tech side of our product to match the team's big dreams. Between the ambitions of the founders, Mina and Brandon - to make AWS a delight - and the sophistication of the Overnice team's designs, we really had our work cut out for us! And seeing our dreams turn into the sturdy, scalable, beautiful product we're introducing to you today is really rewarding. But our success isn't only about the software. We've watched our team grow, adding new skills and getting better as they developed this new version. Everyone's commitment, creativity, and passion have been really impressive. I feel lucky to work with such skilled people. The release of v2 marks a big moment for us, but trust me, we've got a lot more planned. Each problem we've solved has set us up to take on bigger things, discover new ground, and push our limits. Every piece of code, every brainstorming meeting, and every fixed bug has led to this awesome software that we're proud to present. Curious to know what you think about Flightcontrol 2.0! Your feedback, ideas, and suggestions are welcomed. We're preparing for this new chapter with a strong determination to keep getting better, being creative, and making it more valuable for users. Thanks to everyone who helped out on this project and put in the hard work to make it happen, especially the Overnice team for their fantastic designs. Strap in, folks. This ride is just getting interesting!

Greetings, Product Hunt, I’m thrilled to share a slice of the behind-the-scenes craftsmanship that has gone into the making of Flightcontrol v2. In spearheading the creation of our UI library, my focus was on embodying a complex design system that could tackle the multifaceted demands of our product. This wasn't just about choosing the right tools; it was about crafting a foundation that would allow our design language to scale with elegance and efficiency. Through this process, we constructed a series of interconnected components that translate intricate design into a cohesive library, ensuring a seamless user interface that is both consistent and maintainable as our product evolves. One of the highlights from my end has been developing those sleek and intuitive Metric Charts. These charts are more than just visual tools; they are a gateway for our users to effortlessly manage their AWS services directly within Flightcontrol, bypassing the need for the AWS console. It’s about making the experience less about navigating through AWS and more about simplicity and clarity. The result? A series of beautiful, responsive graphs that offer real-time insights without the clutter — crafted to enhance our user’s interaction with their infrastructure. As we unveil Flightcontrol v2 and our new website, I’m excited for you to experience these features firsthand. I can't wait to hear your feedback to make the product even better for you Here’s to building tools that don’t just work well but also feel good to use 🚀🚀🚀

What’s up Product Hunt and welcome to Flightcontrol! There’s no reason handling something as monstrous as AWS shouldn’t be fun. It certainly was fun getting all the spaceships in there. No blood, no tears but a whole lot of sweat went into everything from finding the right font to tweaking the UX with early feedback. As a part of Overnice studio, I have to say: Flightcontrol has been the most amazing partner, creating this spacey brand and spacious UI/UX we can now finally release. ⚠️ Please bombard us with feedback and nitpick on all the bugs we couldn’t fix pre-launch. We’re gonna catch them all ⚠️ It’s rare to find a company that amazing at juggling hard work and ambition with simply being goodhearted and mindful people. A huge shoutout and a big thank you to the girls and boys of Flightcontrol. It's been a hell of a flight

It has really been an incredible journey to be a part of 2.0 launch of Flightcontrol and being able to collaborate with such an amazing team ✨ I have been a part of the team for the past 6 months as an intern. The amount of learning opportunity and creative freedom encouraged cannot be understated. Being a student, the opportunity to be able to contribute and to see the final product after working on its various moving parts has been a blast! I’m really excited to be a part of this team 🚀!

This has been an awesome and challenging project to work on, and it's been really cool to see the product design grow from the MVP to a polished offering! I've been working at Flightcontrol for about a year and a half now, and everything feels so much different from the beginning. Growth is exciting When I started this product, I was a junior, but during the course of this work, I've been promoted to a mid-level, and it's been a blast. There's a high degree of autonomy in the company, and I feel that my ideas and feedback are respected despite having less experience on the team. There's been plenty of opportunities to step up as an engineer and an employee, and I've loved that. It's great to see the finished product- sometimes I spend so much time behind the scenes that I forget what it all looks like, and I'm blown away by just how cool it actually is when I use it. Even with this new release, there's still so much potential out there, and I'm excited to be a part of this rocket ship! 🚀

in 2018 I became the head of the cloud (AWS) under my VPs organization and that experience was massively valuable. it helps me avoid the fear of the cloud.

This looks amazing! Great visual identity, clear value proposition, and well organized information throughout the website. The only thing I was a bit confusing was the pricing plans: I understand that in the free plan we have to pay for the AWS bill, but what about the other plans? You charge e.g. $50/service, but on top of that am I also responsible for paying for the AWS bill? So it's $50/service/month for the convenience of not having to manage AWS (basically, $50/service/mo instead of paying a DevOps guy)? :) Do you offer guidance for those who are not familiar with the infrastructure itself, or does your service requires the user to know what infra they'd like to set up and only helps with setting it up? (Because there are multiple ways to achieve similar results, with difference security policies, different access, diff resources, etc.)

Congrats on your launch! Love the fact your doing this we really need an easier cloud solution for this

Paul Graham famously told startups to do things that don’t scale at the very beginning. I can tell you that the flight control team is living that phrase. The first time I tried to use their product I ran into an issue on AWS’s end. The founders spent multiple hours with me trying to troubleshoot it when stack exchange and Reddit research failed me, and they successfully diagnosed the issue which helped me fix it. Boom, loyal customer for life.

Congrats on the launch, curious what inspired you to build this and how did you get your first initial traction?

Brandon is an excellent founder and Flightcontrol is a wonderful product. This is a team and product I’d be happy to trust with my business and recommend to friends. 🪄🛫

It's a pretty interesting proposition. I like the idea of bringing together developer experience of typical PaaS but in my own AWS account. I have a few questions, I hope you'll be able to share on this :): - Would this enable me to deploy a container as easily as I would on a traditional PaaS? - What are the timelines for the serverless offering? - How configurable is an application deployed with Flightcontrol? - if I deploy an app with Flightcontrol, do I have access to all the knobs in AWS? - Is it possible to get a Terraform file from Flightcontrol? The product looks fantastic and I'm rooting for you!!

AWS made easy, nice one! 👏 The product looks really good, and I’ll definitely give it a go when the opportunity comes. Congratulations on the launch! 🚀

I recently had to launch a new product quickly. We started on Render at first and really appreciated the simple setup and workflow there. But as we developed our product further we stumbled at some limitations of Render's offering and had to move to our own AWS. As I didn't want to give up on the simplicity and ease of use I searched for a solution that will give us the best of both worlds. Flightcontrol was exactly this: easy to setup, simple to use but gives you the power of your own AWS account. This new release makes Flightcontrol offering even more powerful and I'm really excited about it and what future releases will look like. Beyond the great product, Flightcontrol's support was amazing. We had some very specific configuration needed for our setup and the team was always there to provide guidance and help us with getting it working.

Hey guys, congrats on the launch and loving the UI on the first glance already! And they look more interesting as I get in. Some questions off the top of my head 1. Are your target audiences small to mid size organizations, or would Flightcontrol be suited for larger orgs too? 2. How do you choose which AWS service to support? 3. How does this differ from AWS console? If I understood it correctly, Flightcontrol is focused on making a more abstracted + simplified view? 4. Can we tweak all the knobs that are available on AWS via Flightcontrol? 5. How do you deal with InfoSec compliance ie Soc2? Thanks guys :)

Congratulations to the team for this awesome launch. AWS became sooo easy to use and understand after I first used Flightcontrol. Out of the box we could deploy 100% of all services in my infrastructure. Amazing redesign and great user experience !

The Flightcontrol team is fantastic. We needed to quickly reduce our infra bill due to rapidly rising costs on a free product we offered. In addition to having great docs for self service, the team worked with us 1:1 to move a large production service into AWS. In the last several months, the only time I've had to think about the Flightcontrol infra is when they dropped our bill by 90% after changing pricing models.