Launch HN: Argonaut (YC S21) – Easily Deploy Apps and Infra to AWS and GCP
Hello HN, I'm Surya, the founder of Argonaut (https://www.argonaut.dev/), a unified platform that tries to make software ops painless, so teams can focus on building features instead of building and managing infrastructure. Argonaut combines Kubernetes PaaS, a CI pipeline builder, and a Terraform state manager with prebuilt AWS and GCP modules. Here’s a demo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8DZsYXxA2tQ.

I’ve helped build infrastructure tooling from scratch at multiple companies and realized two things: that the shape of the solution with the advent of containerization, Kubernetes, and hyperscalers is quite similar across orgs, and that highly knowledgeable engineers are needed to build and manage this system.

Internal infrastructure teams juggle a multitude of tasks—provisioning cloud infrastructure, configuring runtimes, building code, securing artifacts, running tests, and deploying at scale. Post-deployment, they're also tasked with monitoring app performance, errors, uptime, and cost visibility. It's a lot of work, and having to build this tooling in-house is a deep inefficiency in engineering teams. The root of the problem is that AWS and GCP provide a lower level of abstraction than the entities, such as environments and applications, that developers have to deal with, and a ton of work is getting duplicated, often by underfunded teams, across many orgs. Argonaut’s objective is to be the developer platform and control center that you would otherwise have to build internally.

Argonaut provides an intuitive developer experience that simplifies working with Kubernetes and enables developer self-service, reducing the burden on devops and platform teams. We've productized this workflow orchestration, incorporating best practices to provide a push-to-deploy experience with flexible pipelines and scalable infrastructure, all within minutes.

Our users are startups across various domains like healthcare, IoT, fintech, AI, and SaaS products. Over the last two years, we’ve enabled customers to scale their engineering teams 10x and manage 10+ environments in parallel without needing a dedicated infra/DevOps team, saving them precious time and resources.

Argonaut lets you set up production-ready infrastructure and customize as you scale. We then let you set up automated deployments of your application in minutes. We offer configurable build-and-deploy pipelines, powered by Dagger and ArgoCD, and deep integration with GitHub Actions and GitLab CI. In addition, we support container registries, multiple cloud accounts, observability stacks, cost visibility providers, CDNs, and the entire helm chart ecosystem of Kubernetes, with more integrations on the way.

Key features include: (1) easily create environments encapsulating cloud infrastructure, applications, and deployment pipelines (2) autoscaling deployments for apps and cronjobs to GCP and AWS with a progression across environments (3) compose deployments across multiple environments with our visual pipeline builder (4) get cost estimates before making infra changes, giving you a clear understanding of your expenses; (5) managed Terraform state and pre-built modules that just work, fostering team collaboration on infrastructure.

Argonaut is self-serve, so you can sign up and start using the product right away: https://ship.argonaut.dev. There is a free tier that doesn't require a credit card to get started. We'd be delighted to have you try it, and are happy to help with onboarding.

If your teams work with AWS, GCP, or Kubernetes, I’d love to hear about your experiences, pain points, and what you think a product like Argonaut should be able to do. Looking forward to your comments!