Company.create

Welcome to Stark & Wayne, the new consultancy from Dr Nic Williams for teams and companies using Cloud Foundry to make their lives and their customers lives better. We work with teams and companies who want to become real-world superheroes.

If you’ve used Heroku for your pet projects, then we want to bring you Cloud Foundry for your work projects. We also want to work with you on your projects. If your workplace cares about continuously improving development and operations, then you qualify.

If the world of corporate Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS), DevOps and agile development is exciting to you, then you are allowed to follow the @StarkAndWayne twitter account. For free. I know, I know. I shouldn’t. Hold me back.

Developers need tools to get the job done – to iterate fast on a new idea or to maintain and evolve production systems. You do a great job and you’re a super hero. I’ve loved making tools over the last decade (rubigen, appscrolls, newgem, bosh-gen, bosh-solo, TextMate bundles, choctop, install_theme, tabtab, ey migrate) and I’ve loved talking about tools at conferences (presentations). It is now extremely exciting to create a new company for the creation, promotion and support of tools and support systems specifically for developers.

This company is called Stark & Wayne; named after the two most famous fictional tool creators – Tony Stark and Bruce Wayne. Every developer can be a super hero. You just need the right tools. Batmobile optional.

Who are the initial target customer and what will we do specifically?

If your company is looking at running the open source Cloud Foundry platform-as-a-service (PaaS), wants ongoing assistance running Cloud Foundry and developers to work on your internal project teams, then you qualify as someone I’d love to work with. If you care enough about your team and your fellow developers to want to run an open source PaaS, then we will all get on famously.

Initial customers

Stark & Wayne already has two wonderful customers to work with. Ironically, I only wanted to share that Stark & Wayne existed when I knew it had an initial paying customer. But two is so much better!

One customer is a 3000-person non-technology oriented company who has a very innovative engineering organization based out of New York. Scrum teams, daily deployments, continuous deployment via Jenkins.

The other is the newly created Pivotal Initiative – the new parent organization for Cloud Foundry, taking over from VMWare at the end of 2012. In just one month some very exciting open source work has been completed. If you’re on the Cloud Foundry mailing lists you’ve seen a little bit of it. It’s coming soon. Cloud Foundry just got a lot simpler to get installed and running.

Initial employees

Today it is just Dr Nic, speaking here so eloquently in the 3rd person. Incredibly, already several people have already expressed delight in joining S&W. That made me very happy.

It’s great to be back running a company and having people wanting to join for the journey!

Initial thank you’s

I am very fortunate to have met many people and learnt many things about the history, present and future of our profession. I want to thank and acknowledge the dozens of incredible people I worked with at Engine Yard over the last two years. Thanks also to the many, many people in the field of PaaS and devops who are either personal friends, are acquaintances over twitter or github, or I stalk them quietly on the internet when they’re saying profound things and think no one in particular is listening.

I also want to thank the many people I’ve met over the last year from the Cloud Foundry core team at the Pivotal Initiative (previously VMWare). There are an awful lot of incredibly talented people working on an open source PaaS that anyone can use for internal or commercial purposes.

Thanks to all the people on the Cloud Foundry mailing lists (vcap-dev & bosh-dev) who answer my questions. Oooh, and also to the growing number of new people on the lists who now read my answers to their questions!

And thanks to Rob Mee for giving me space at Pivotal Labs HQ in San Francisco, free lunches on Tuesdays, and a budget to add some extra magic and education around the edges of the incredible core of Cloud Foundry. He and his team will be wonderful stewards for the Cloud Foundry open source ecosystem.

Can you become a customer?

I’d love to chat with you and hear your story. Perhaps we can work together; or perhaps I can point you in the direction you need to go next. Email me at [email protected], tell me your interesting story and then let’s have a chat on Skype.

If you want a Heroku running inside your company then what you want is Cloud Foundry. It’s completely open source and can run inside your existing infrastructure and on your own Amazon AWS account.

It might be incredibly easy for all developers to use and they’ll be very happy that you’re running Cloud Foundry; yet its possibly one of the more complex systems you’ll run within your company; and will take your team some time to get familiar with its operations and how to customize and upgrade it comfortably.

You can be a customer if you want Cloud Foundry for your internal team and want ongoing support and assistance. Once you get a small Cloud Foundry deployment running, you’ll never stop growing, upgrading, and extending it.

You can also be a customer if you run an ISP or hosting company and want to share Cloud Foundry with your customers. You’ll then be able to offer Heroku-esque experience for small apps and your dedicated VMs or machines when their applications grow up.

You can also be a customer if you’re already running Cloud Foundry and want to bring in engineers, front-end developers, management, and more, then I’d love to find a way to help. We’re very excited for you, your devs and your ops people!

How to get started with Cloud Foundry and with Stark & Wayne?

For your team and company, we’re all just at the start of something special and empowering. The first wave of Platform-as-a-Service, such as Heroku and Engine Yard, has revolutionized the productivity of development teams and it has enabled many modern software practices such as Agile and Scrum. The combination has worked wonders for small startups with nothing to lose; and both the Cloud Foundry technology and the Agile and Scrum practices are maturing for teams and companies of all sizes and motivations.

We can’t help everyone all at the same time, so please start thinking ahead for 2013 and when you’ll want Cloud Foundry running in production; then we all need to map backwards and get a plan into place: trial it, get one of your small top teams using it, go through some upgrade cycles, go through some scale up cycles, and then feel strong about running your production applications upon it. This will take time within your team and organization, so let’s have a chat and map out your trial & adoption plan.

Send me an email at [email protected]
, tell me your interesting story and then let’s have a chat on Skype. Let’s upgrade everyone into superheroes!

Want to join Stark & Wayne?

If you’re already deep in the world of Cloud Foundry, Open Stack/AWS VPC/vSphere, and devops; or you’re a web dev and would just love to work on projects within teams who are using these modern technologies, please also send me an email.