Moment: A Fresh Approach to Infrastructure Tooling

Posted in announcements

Feb 16th, 2022

Today we’re launching Moment in private alpha. Moment is a platform that helps infrastructure engineers quickly build interactive docs and runbooks, service catalogs, and internal ops tools.

Over the next few months, we’ll start onboarding people from the waitlist.

Infrastructure as Liability

Fast growing web businesses typically use dozens of different infrastructure tools and services — Kubernetes, AWS, Envoy, Datadog, GitHub, PagerDuty, etc. These tools are also generally siloed: they have their own notion of access control and safety, their own data, their own UIs.

We believe that this tool sprawl is the cause of most operational work in modern technology companies. For example:

Mission-critical workflows (e.g., rotating public certificates, spot-changing autoscaling limits) generally require expertise in multiple of these tools, making onboarding more expensive and placing a higher support burden on infrastructure teams. Successful teams invest in that on-ramp process but it is difficult to scale and very expensive to maintain.
Safeguards are very hard to build, because these tools have incompatible notions of identity and access control. This results in manual workflows, dangerous scripts, unnecessarily privileged console access, and possibly service-level incidents.
Sharing expertise is very challenging. Stale wikis and broken search are the norm. Information needed to take critical action is often not in the same place where the action is taken. For example, rotating public certificates to keep runbooks and knowledge bases up to date is a hard and largely thankless job.

The consequences of these misshapen developer experiences are familiar to operations teams: slower incident response, more service-level outages, and a general feeling of — should we call it lack of ownership? — among those responsible for keeping software live and performant.

We’ve built something to help

Moment is a platform to help infrastructure teams share their knowledge and scale their expertise. You can think of it as a way to build interactive apps that pull data and let you act on what you’re seeing, quickly and natively. Here’s what you get.

A never-out-of-date, programmable knowledge base

The core of Moment is the canvas. Embed charts with live data, buttons that kick off shell scripts, tables with live-updating service data — if you can program it in JavaScript, you can put it in the canvas. Live code means living data that can’t be out of sync — no more broken links, no more stale wikis, no more screenshots of charts from other tools.

A robust UI toolkit for building ops tooling

Infrastructure teams have rich expertise in their tooling, but sometimes not as much expertise in building robust UIs that are accessible to the rest of the organization. Moment ships standard building blocks — tables, charts, buttons, forms — that let you skip wrestling with charting libraries and table components, and ship scalable internal ops tooling for your team.

For example, a livesite review tool might have a table of all the alerts from the previous week, and a button that opens GitHub with an issue template filled out. A service catalog might have a table of all your ECS services, and a set of charts for default metrics that change as you select a service from the table.

Moment comes with these building blocks pre-written for you to use out of the box.

One identity, hundreds of tools

Ops tooling needs to be safe to be scalable. Moment allows infrastructure engineers to apply fine-grained permissions to critical operations — allowing for double opt in, allowing operations by role, and so on.