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Launch HN: Gold Fig (YC S19) – Version Control for Settings Pages

127 pointsby vikrumalmost 6 years ago
Ahoy HN! We’re Greg and Vikrum, co-founders of Gold Fig.<p>Gold Fig is a tool that automatically creates a shared log of configuration changes to the SaaS tools you use. Modern applications are built atop a menagerie of these tools. Services like Stripe, SendGrid, Zapier, Segment, Twilio, Sentry, Travis, GSuite, domain registrars, CDNs, or even internal dashboards can directly affect your production and corporate environments, yet their configuration is not tracked with anything near the same fidelity as source code.<p>Mistakes occur when people make config changes without proper context. Depending on which service was impacted this can result in outage, loss of revenue, or reputational harm. It’s usually the thing that broke in a subtle way for some extended period of time that bites the worst. Moreover, when an incident does occur, the respondent often also has limited context about changes made, leading to longer resolution times and possibly even further misconfiguration as previous configuration was lost. As an example, we&#x27;ve personally experienced this pain when managing the CDNs fronting core services. We had to synchronize changes across our Fastly configurations, DNS records, and origin servers, with no single source of truth to guide us. Any mistake could result in downtime.<p>Some teams attempt to address this lack of context by putting one person in charge of doing all of the configuration for a service provider, leading to development bottlenecks. Other teams attempt to manually track these updates in a text file, email threads, or in their team chat. With Gold Fig, we want teams to be able to confidently share the management of their SaaS tools. Team members should have access to the full context behind all of the configurations they manage, and should be able to easily keep themselves up to date as they evolve. Gold Fig lives alongside automation tools like Terraform and Cloudformation, allowing you to plug the gaps that those tools can’t cover.<p>Our initial product is a browser extension that automatically launches on settings pages of SaaS tools. When you make a change on these sites, the extension gives you the opportunity to also provide a commit message, similar to how you would with a code check-in. Now you have a record of some button clicks that impacted your environment. The change has a permanent URL so you can look it up later if you forgot what you did, use it to help you move settings from staging to prod, or have others review the changes that were made. Now that Gold Fig has captured what changed, when, and why, you’ll never get stuck in a situation where only one person knows exactly how something was configured. A byproduct of Gold Fig is that you now have a foothold into being able to undo these types of changes. We envision Gold Fig being part of all devops team’s way of surfacing and tracking changes. In the future we’ll be able to empower teams to do pull-request like approvals, show context before a change is about to occur, and provide more awareness to those responding production incidents.<p>Our extension is able to capture payloads while being generally agnostic of the site itself. We’ll capture changes even if we haven’t seen the site before or if something has changed from the previous time we encountered it. For common sites like AWS or GCP we capture additional rich context like the product being impacted, the region&#x2F;zone, and project name. We also aim to work on sites we don’t have access to like internal dashboards teams have built to manage customers, environments, or settings.<p>We’d love to hear your experience with settings pages and SaaS configs. We’ll be here listening to your feedback, answering your questions, and happy to field any feature requests for Gold Fig you may have. You can give it a whirl here: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;app.goldfiglabs.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;app.goldfiglabs.com&#x2F;</a> Thank you!<p>Greg &amp; Vikrum - hello@goldfiglabs.com

9 comments

mayop100almost 6 years ago
The Gold Fig founders know what they&#x27;re talking about here. Vikrum ran devops for Firebase from the first server in 2011 up to millions of users after the Google acquisition. Greg was the TL for the Firebase Realtime Database, our flagship product that powers a huge number of apps. They&#x27;re experts, not only because of what they learned building Firebase, but also because they got insight into how our big customers ran their services and teams.<p>Vikrum actually built a browser plugin at Firebase that was simple but incredibly useful. It color-coded cloud settings pages for different environments (prod, staging, dev) to prevent someone from accidentally changing the config in prod when they didn&#x27;t mean to. We required the whole Firebase team to use it, and it honestly saved us from multiple downtime incidents.<p>If you&#x27;re managing a service, I really suggest you try Gold Fig out. You can get the benefit of everything that Greg and Vikrum have learned (painfully from years of real experience) about how to run services and be safe with your config!<p>(I&#x27;m one of the Firebase founders)
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_piusalmost 6 years ago
<i>... A browser extension that automatically launches on settings pages of SaaS tools. When you make a change on these sites, the extension gives you the opportunity to also provide a commit message, similar to how you would with a code check-in. Now you have a record of some button clicks that impacted your environment. The change has a permanent URL so you can look it up later if you forgot what you did, use it to help you move settings from staging to prod, or have others review the changes that were made. ... Our extension is able to capture payloads while being generally agnostic of the site itself. We’ll capture changes even if we haven’t seen the site before or if something has changed from the previous time we encountered it.</i><p>This sounds amazing, would have definitely made my life easier on many projects ... looking forward to checking it out!<p>Oh, and one thing to add if you haven’t already is the ability to whitelist which domains the extension is active on for privacy purposes.
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pageandrewalmost 6 years ago
This is a space where I really prefer Infrastructure as Code&#x2F;configuration as code. Something like Terraform for instance.<p>Once the complex configuration is represented in code, we can take full advantage of the tools we already use to manage code, like version control, diffing, pull requests, issue tracking, etc.
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appwizalmost 6 years ago
Congrats on launching a great idea! This is super useful because not every configuration can be modeled with Terraform&#x2F;CloudFormation or such.<p>Are you planning to add the ability to revert a configuration? I realize it’s not always possible but might be useful for simple situations where a toggle was flipped.
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teejalmost 6 years ago
Love the idea! It always made me nervous when I was given access to other teams tools with the ability to inadvertently break them.<p>It sounds like for now you could still end up with out-of-band changes because you can’t force folks to use a browser extension before twiddling switches on a confit page. What’s your long term vision for tackling that aspect of the problem?
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aidosalmost 6 years ago
That’s actually very clever. There are even some services where you have to manually update the settings per user, which is no fun for anybody. A way to eventually consolidate all our saas config would be ace.
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jamestimminsalmost 6 years ago
Congrats on your launch! This sounds super cool. It&#x27;s interesting to see all of these services that are productizing very specific parts of the development and deployment stack.
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gabrielrdzalmost 6 years ago
best of luck with this, sounds like a great idea... there are always new improvements to be made to processes and you just found a great one.
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tnoletalmost 6 years ago
What if one of my coworkers does not have the browser extension?
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