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Batteries Included Thesis

There’s a need for an integrated software platform with all the parts of a modern tech stack pre-configured to work together, tuned, and operated hands-off. Savvy and well-constructed infrastructure can be a force multiplier for the business. Still, it requires lots of moving pieces that integrate smoothly, stably, and scalably to create something that’s more than the parts. That’s not easy or cheap.

Companies want to pay to have their undifferentiated infrastructure problems wholly solved, and an all-inclusive upscale solution would command a good price while being unique in the market. We can provide that integrated collaborative platform, automated operations to scale, and experienced teams for specialty work, making Batteries Included total offering better than much of the cloud and an infrastructure team.

Any Company’s Infrastructure Team

Anecdotally all tech companies end up with an infrastructure team in name or in self-appointed function. Modern businesses always seem to need lots of the same software, including databases, networking, email, server health, file storage, web servers, etc. This lower-level stack continues to grow more and more complex, with each level building on the hard-won knowledge of engineers, who love the details of bytes, IOPS, hertz, and PPS. However, these contributions are often unrealized and forgotten because these backend systems are not unique, driving business, and they didn’t get completed.

Most companies need a database, but few are making extra money because they have a better database. The same can be said for lots of critical software.

Since businesses keep creating the infrastructure team, it has to be instructive of what they really want. These teams are all building a platform to tie all the systems together, then giving that platform to the product-focused or business-focused parts of the company.

How many startup companies around the world are burning VC capital building a login page for the ML notebooks? or a listing page for the database backups? Lots and lots of duplicated work that has to be maintained, or worse, break production. These small teams don’t have the resources to dedicate and love every part of the platform.

Tech Leaders

World-class tech companies are investing heavily in their internal tools platforms. It’s their superpower that’s used to move into new markets quickly and turn around struggling acquisitions. Starting the next photo-sharing app at a FAANG is easier because the complex parts are simply an arms reach away. Need scalable storage? Yep, it’s over there. Need fast, easy ML? Yep, easy to build models right this way? Build service, hosting, monitoring… Yep all done already.

Not Hotdog

This superpower directly impacts the startup world all the time. Take the famous hypothetical app Not Hotdog the following sequence is so believable. It seems trite:

Cloud

The cloud shows that there’s a ravenous market for solutions that make technology easier, cheaper, and more elastic. Many companies are willing to pay large ( $332B ) amounts to make computing even a small amount easier. ( This is easier? )

However, the cloud’s not easy, far from it. Many teams now dedicate large portions of their time to cloud ops. Instead of making the computing burden easy, the cloud has forcefully subdivided the work and charged more for the privilege of using their software after renting their hardware. The cloud remains hard but easier than any alternative.

Solution

Batteries Included is building a modern technical infrastructure stack and the infrastructure team to back it up. Every part of the platform will be cared for, automatically operating and configuring itself on any customer’s setup. Each and every subsystem should be integrated and work well with each other. No need for hard decisions because our world-class experts have already made those, then automated and integrated everything. We have built all the integrations together with the best user interfaces and the best backend systems. All of this can be offered in an easy-to-use system that hides the complexity of AWS, GKE, or your own hardware.

No need to learn a new programming language to create a postgres database for a new project. Instead, go to the dashboard, click a button and answer common sense prose questions. Boom database all set with world-class monitoring, backups, etc. Everything is there because our team has delivered better than any other infrastructure team, all combined in one scalable package.

We don’t provide just the currently expected tools, though. Batteries Included provides the tools that are needed tomorrow. So we have a full suite of everything needed to get impact from machine learning. From being able to spawn collaborative software to train production models while deploying and monitoring production models, The Batteries Included platform will guide and make it easier the getting the most out of technologies like PyTorch, kubeflow, spark, and argo.

This allows your engineers to focus on building the company’s parts that are unique and allows your data scientists to focus on finding new insights for models. All of this is possible because the platform has made it easy to use and share all the infrastructure, from data storage to networking to logging to monitoring. Everything is integrated and operated by the best.