Aaron Torres and Ala Shiban are from Klotho, which powers Infrastructure Copilot, the most advanced infrastructure design tool that understands how to define, connect, and scale your infrastructure-as-code.
Victoria talks to Aaron and Ala about the Klotho engine, Klotho the CLI tool, and InfraCopilot and how they work together to help enable developer teams to iterate on applications and features quickly.
Klotho (https://klo.dev/)
Infrastructure Copilot (https://infracopilot.io/)
Follow Klotho on Github (https://github.com/klothoplatform/klotho), Discord (https://discord.com/invite/4wwBRqqysY), Twitter (https://twitter.com/GetKlotho), or LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/company/klothoplatform/).
Follow Aaron Torres on LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/in/torresaaron/), or Twitter (https://twitter.com/aarontorres).
Follow Ala Shiban on LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/in/alashiban/) or Twitter (https://twitter.com/AlaShiban).
Follow thoughtbot on Twitter (https://twitter.com/thoughtbot) or LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/company/150727/).
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Transcript:
VICTORIA: This is the Giant Robots Smashing Into Other Giant Robots Podcast, where we explore the design, development, and business of great products. I'm your host, Victoria Guido. And with me today is Aaron Torres and Ala Shiban from Klotho, which powers Infrastructure Copilot, the most advanced infrastructure design tool that understands how to define, connect, and scale your infrastructure-as-code. Aaron and Ala, thank you for joining me.
ALA: Thank you for having us.
AARON: Yeah, thank you very much.
VICTORIA: Well, great. I wanted to just start with a little bit of a icebreaker; maybe tell me a little bit more about what the weather is like where you're currently at.
AARON: So I'm in St. Louis, Missouri. Right now, it is definitely...it feels like summer finally. So we're getting some nice, warm days and clear skies.
ALA: And I'm in LA. And it's gloomier than I would like compared to what it's been in the last few years. But I'll take it if this means we're getting closer to summer.
VICTORIA: Right. And I'm not too far from you, Ala, in San Diego, and it's a little chillier than I would prefer as well. But that's what we get for living close to the beach. So there's always trade-offs.
Well, wonderful. I'm so excited to talk to you about your product here today. Let me start with a question about, let's say, I'm a non-technical founder, and I've just heard about your product. What's your pitch to someone in that position on the value of your tool?
ALA: For somebody who isn't technical, I would say you can enable your team, your developer team, to quickly iterate on their applications or features and let InfraCopilot and Klotho take care of taking that application or features and deploy them and getting them running on the cloud.
VICTORIA: Okay. So maybe I've been thinking about having to hire an AWS engineer or someone who's an infrastructure engineer. I could consider getting a tool like Klotho and Infrastructure Copilot to allow my developers to take on more of that responsibility themselves.
ALA: Absolutely.
VICTORIA: Gotcha. Okay, well, great. So let me ask about how did it all get started? What was the impetus that set you on this journey
ALA: Both Aaron and I used to work at Riot Games, and I used to lead the cloud services org at Riot. I had about 50 people, 40 engineers, as part of a larger 120-person org, infrastructure platform org, which was tasked with building the platform that runs League of Legends, VALORANT, for 200 million people all around the world, in China. Full DevOps mode for Riot developers and full ops mode for running in China.
It took us three years, a lot of effort. And by the time we were done, it was already legacy, and that seemed broken to me. We were already getting started to do another round of upgrades and iterations. At that point, I decided to leave. But I could