At Foghorn, we’ve been writing modular DevOps code for many years.  Over time, we have developed a set of modules that represent about 80% of our customers needs, and leveraged those modules to accelerate the timeline of DevOps projects.  This includes infrastructure as code (network, servers, IAM rules, security rules, etc.), deployment code, and operations code.  Generally we charge a fixed fee for projects which leverage FogOps IP in place of our standard hourly rates. This has been a great model to help get new customers and new initiatives up and running quickly at a relatively low cost.  Once delivered, our customers either ask us to evolve and iterate on their code, or they take complete ownership.

Recently we’ve spent a considerable amount of time to modularize our code and offer it to our customers directly.  During this process, we felt that defining a pricing model was holding us back from releasing more value more quickly to our customers.  We wanted the ability to churn out modules fast, without coming up with pricing. We also wanted the ability to maintain and update our modules.  We came to the conclusion that the best way we could serve our customers is to give this code away, for free, to the community of customers who have selected Foghorn as their Public Cloud and DevOps provider.  We are excited to help our customers grow quickly, and hope to see great uptake in the use of our code.

We discussed open-sourcing the modules completely, but ran into a few snags.  If our goal was mass adoption of our project, we would simply open source it.  But our goal is not to create another public repository of community recipes.  The value that our modules bring are that they represent Foghorn’s prescriptive opinion on best practice design and implementation.  The contributors for this project will be limited to Foghorn engineers and our clients’ engineers who share the same philosophies around building and running infrastructure and applications as code.

Our clients who choose to use our modules can benefit in a few ways:

1. Our clients chose Foghorn because they appreciate and align with Foghorn’s principals for running mission critical workloads.  Leveraging our modules is an easy way to adopt those principles.
2. Even if our clients know all of our principals by heart, and have the staff capabilities to implement as code, they can save a great deal of time and energy by using our modules as starting points for their custom DevOps code.
3. Many of our customers simply don’t have the bandwidth to do this, and so they pay us to do it for them.  By leveraging our modules, we finish faster, and they pay less.
4. Faster is not only cheaper. It’s faster too!  Our customers can accelerate their mission critical initiatives, making themselves more competitive, and positively impacting the top line of their business.
5. We hate getting waken up at night.  We always err on the side of stability and reliability with our designs. Our clients’ engineering teams usually appreciate this.

So how do you sign up?  Simple.  Give us a ring.