Developers Just Want to Write Code. How Slim.AI is Helping Them Do More of That

Why We Founded Slim.AI

By Kyle Quest & John Amaral

The world of cloud-native development and DevOps gets more complex — perhaps unnecessarily so — every day. Just looking at the CNCF Landscape diagram will make your head spin (it doesn’t even fit on one screen!) Imagine trying to be an expert in all of those tools and solutions. It’s impossible. Simply knowing and using Docker and Kubernetes well enough is a huge challenge for most engineers. As coders ourselves, we’ve seen these innovations help our companies reach incredible speed and scale. But we’ve also experienced lost time, high costs for unnecessary cloud infrastructure and storage, jumbled codebases, complex dependencies and lots and lots of manual processes.

DevOps sounds good on paper (“you build it, you run it”), but it gets complicated, time consuming, and painful pretty fast. It’s hard to keep up with everything going on in your domain as a developer, but now you need to become an infrastructure expert too and that’s not easy even for the infrastructure engineers, who specialize just in that. We entered the era of the cloud-native infrastructure, but we are still in the stone age phase of it where the tooling is extremely low level, inefficient and where a lot of things still have to be done manually. Every modern engineering organization building cloud-based applications struggles with these challenges. We’ve seen it over and over again. And that’s why we founded Slim.AI.

Our DockerSlim tool pioneered a new application-centric approach to optimizing containers, providing a foundation for the next wave of automation in DevOps. It goes beyond containers and it requires a platform and an ecosystem to redefine how DevOps is done. It’s a perfect opportunity for a new company.

Containers are a fundamental part of the modern cloud-native infrastructure and solving the developer experience and DevOps problems with containers is a great starting point especially now that container use is expanding to serverless.

Our initial goal is to help developers accelerate their DevOps workflows for their containerized cloud-native application infrastructure expanding the initial application intelligence concept to other parts of the DevOps lifecycle.

Slim.AI co-founders: Kyle(left) & John (right)

Slim.AI is starting its journey to make the modern to make modern cloud development simpler, easier, and more reliable by addressing these initial problem spaces:

1. Analyzing and visualizing container composition: Our new visualization tool allows you to understand, evaluate and control the contents and composition of a container, including all of its layers, packages, and files.
2. Optimizing containers: Building on the core DockerSlim technology, we make containers smaller, faster to deploy, effortless to scan, and less expensive to manage. Our Slim.AI Cloud (coming soon) will make it easy to integrate with container repos and CI/CD systems through API’s and built-in connectors.
3. Creating production-ready containers with minimum effort: We simplify the build-and-release cycle by accelerating, automating and offloading common container build and optimization tasks.
4. Managing Container Development: Our tools will help developers, DevOps engineers, and tech leads automatically tackle container management, apply best practices and be “prod-ready” faster and easier.

We aim to demystify cloud development and take the misery and manual work out of container management and CI/CD pipelines. We believe dev time is best spent solving problems for their users, not debugging infrastructure, hand-optimizing containers, or dealing with builds.

We’re a company built by developers for developers. As such, we’re eager for you to try our work. Getting started with Slim.AI is easy:

• Get the App : Check out our Open Source project at DockerSlim to run the DockerSlim command line tool.
• Become an Early Tester : We are offering early access to our Slim.AI Cloud Platform for developers that want to kick the tires and help us make it better. To register, go to Slim.AI and join our community.

Slim.AI is a developer-first company. We like to keep things simple and transparent, and want you to be a part of that. We’re always looking to connect with people passionate about developing apps the way we do: Cloud first, ready for scale, and as efficiently as possible. If you’re interested in working with us -whether as a tester, design partner, or as a colleague or code contributor- join our community at Slim.AI, reach out to us at community@slim.ai and get the app here. We look forward to developing apps with you real soon!

Our domains: Slim.AI, Dockersl.im

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