Hi HN! We’re Evis and Nick and we’re the founders of Nucleus (https://nucleuscloud.com), a Kubernetes developer platform. We automate infrastructure, security, integrations, and more, helping developers ship faster while also automating a lot of repetitive tasks for devops and platform teams. Here’s a demo: https://www.loom.com/share/95265177704346c7b379e981978cd8c5.

It's expensive, time-consuming, and technically difficult to build a secure, scalable Kubernetes platform. Yet many companies that do this spend 6+ months building it themselves and then hire an expensive platform team to manage it. We've talked to customers who have spent $1.5M to build something that isn't their core product.

On the technology side, you have to solve for authentication, authorization, service registry and discovery, scalability, observability, infrastructure and more. Most teams end up stitching together a bunch of OS tools and cloud primitives just to end up with a fragile system that’s difficult to maintain as it grows. On the people side, it’s difficult and expensive to find developers and devops engineers who deeply understand Kubernetes and distributed systems. When they leave, tech and process documentation is incomplete, hard to find and often outdated.

Nick and I have been building infrastructure platforms for the past 7 years at companies like NewFront, Skyflow, IBM and Garmin. Companies like ours were spending a lot of time and energy in building internal developer platforms from scratch and then hiring expensive teams to maintain them. These were important platforms but never the companies’ core product. It seemed crazy to us that a series A company would have 2-3 developers spend 6+ months building something that wasn't their core product. We felt like there had to be a better way.

We’re building a platform that accomplishes 4 things: (1) Reduce the time it takes to spin up Kubernetes environments and services; (2) Provide an intuitive developer experience that simplifies working with Kubernetes; (3) Empower devops and platform teams to automate manual tasks and enable developer self service without spending months building infra; (4) Centralize, organize and be a source of truth for infra-related configurations, processes and documentation.

To get into the architecture a bit, you can think of Nucleus as three layers:

At the bottom layer, we build and manage pre-configured Kubernetes clusters in your AWS accounts. We install different add-ons into the cluster that enable key functionality such as security, autoscaling and metrics. You can find a full list in our docs - https://docs.nucleuscloud.com. The idea is that you can run Nucleus on autopilot without needing to be a Kubernetes expert. That said, many engineers want access to kubectl, so we make it easy to provision different user-profiles with different access to kubectl via an IAM role.

The next layer up is the service mesh layer. We built on top of Istio to implement things like authN, authZ, service discovery and registry. We were also really inspired by this blogpost from the neobank Monzo (https://monzo.com/blog/2022/03/31/how-we-secure-monzos-banki...). Each cluster has a dedicated load balancer that sits in a public subnet while the cluster and services are in a private subnet. Communication between these services uses mTLS. Private services are, by default, isolated and can’t talk to any other service unless you explicitly authorize it. We make that as easy as passing in the service name. This is all automated and transparent to the end-user. We’re soon going to be coming out with more features ...