Show HN: Release AI – Talk to Your Infrastructure

[dgiffin]

Hello, Hacker News! I'm David, cofounder of Release (YCW20). Introducing Release AI, a tool designed to empower users with instant access to DevOps expertise, all without monopolizing the valuable time of our experts. Developed with the developer and engineer community in mind, Release AI takes the power of OpenAI's cutting-edge GPT-4 public LLM and augments it with DevOps knowledge.

In its initial phase, Release AI offers "read-only" access to both AWS and Kubernetes. This means you can engage in insightful conversations with your AWS account and K8s infrastructure effortlessly. Looking ahead, our roadmap includes plans to integrate more tools for commonly used systems. This will enable you to automate an even broader array of your daily tasks.

If you would like more info you can check-out our launch YC (it has more details, screen casts): https://www.ycombinator.com/launches/JI1-release-ai-talk-to-...

Our quickstart guide: https://docs.release.com/release-ai/quickstart

Signup and use it: https://beta.release.com/ai/register

Please give it a try! We would love your feedback as we are enhancing Release AI, reach out to us with any feature requests or crazy ideas that Release AI could do for you. Feel free to email me at [email protected] or leave a comment, looking forward to chatting with you.

Join the conversation in our Slack community and discover the future of DevOps with Release AI!

[swozey]

You're basically coming for my job as an SRE/Platarch but great documentation you've covered a lot of scenarios and in a pretty thorough manner.

You should figure out a way to import current infra state and control it from your dashboard and build off of that. That'd be really interesting. Like, take over a tfstate file or whatever pulumi/cdk uses. And definitely just build off of aws/gcp/azure/oracle without IAC like terraformer does.

[regiswilson]

Release engineer here. I believe you have hit on some of the ideas we've certainly discussed way down the road (or sooner than you'd think?). For example, can we inform the AI about your existing infrastructure patterns, tooling, configs, etc. and then ask it to "suggest best practices", "compare to security and compliance policies", "improve" it, "analyse optimisations", "identify unused/overprovisioned pieces", etc. etc.!

[voz_]

What is a Platarch?

[welder]

"Hello database, why are you slow?" /s

Serious feedback:

* Support Digital Ocean (currently only AWS supported)

* Even read-only access is scary... it's not clear if that means you have access to my sensitive user data or just the infra metadata.

Normally I would just include relevant info about my AWS infra in my prompt... how is this better than that?

[throwaway290]

"Hello AWS, why is there this subnet and who added it?"

I'm seriously curious how is asking a chatbot better than looking at a well designed diagram...

[regiswilson]

Release engineer here.

- Support Digital Ocean: We are always looking to add more integrations! - Read-only access to user data: You are welcome to check on the policy and/or adjust it. We default in the recommended case to Read-Only, but you can improve on that with a permissions boundary - How is it better than gathering output from AWS, copy/pasting it into a browser, reading the answer and copy/pasting back into terminal? Well, it's all in one place and it allows a tighter loop between gathering, analysing, and giving responses in one place. It gives lay people better access to data they might not know how to or be able to access, and it gives advanced users smoother, tighter loops on data and access they might already have. Hopefully that gives you some ideas.

[tikkun]

FYI you may want to add something to the homepage to clarify - I was confused initially, because I clicked through to the Launch YC post, and then I clicked the URL at the top and saw the homepage, which talked about Environments as a Service rather than 'talking to your infra'.

[regiswilson]

Release engineer here, we see this as complementary to environments. When you spin up your infrastructure and environments using our service, how do you interact with them? How do you see what is happening? How can you (easily, as a lay person) figure out how to diagnose, maybe even fix, problems? That is the idea, hope you like it.

[tommy_mcclung]

Done

[Michelangelo11]

I like the idea, but how do you handle hallucinations? E.g. when the user asks about their AWS bill, how can they be sure the numbers they get are accurate?

[worldsayshi]

Would be good if any user interface that uses these kinds of llm solutions always include the raw data from the backing services when asked for. Like how in chatgpt you can open and inspect its interaction with a plugin.

[regiswilson]

Release engineer here. That's an excellent question, and we worry about it all the time. The AI "seems" authoritative, but it can't even add 1+1 sometimes :crying-emoji:. We've tried to engineer the prompts and tooling so that it will say "I don't know" if it doesn't know. But we've still seen it say some crazy things, like "Your cluster is fine" when it clearly wasn't. :tounge-sticking-out-emoji: I guess the only real answer is you have to trust but verify.

[whalesalad]

"how much money am i wasting per minute on this huge disk just to achieve high iops?"

[regiswilson]

Relase AI Bot: "Try switching to gp3, you will save money and likely see a performance boost!"

[itsderek23]

Nice work! I'm working on a similar standalone DevOps AI Agent (OpsTower.ai). This post shows how the agent is structured and how it performs against a 40 question evaluation dataset: https://www.opstower.ai/2023-evaluating-ai-agents/

[regiswilson]

That's an impressive article and a lot of good work put into it!

[willsmith72]

Can i not use it without paying?

16:20:50 You: tell me about my infra

16:20:55 Error: Unexpected Error: err=Exception('got 400 from Release API for https://api.release.com/accounts/x/cloud_integrations'), type(err)=<class 'Exception'> Trace Id: 3f448f09-9cdd-489a-b59d-34f1fb03e3e3

16:21:10 You: what kind of databases am i using?

16:21:15 Error: Unexpected Error: err=Exception('got 400 from Release API for https://api.release.com/accounts/x/cloud_integrations'), type(err)=<class 'Exception'> Trace Id: 8d173a36-fd0a-42f6-b62d-0a4721423301

[NickBusey]

You can, sorry about that! This should be fixed now.

If you have any other problems please hop in the slack or shoot us an email! https://join.slack.com/t/release-ai/shared_invite/zt-20dxgp2...

[pradhit]

Hey awesome work! How are you thinking about convincing CTOs/Heads of engineering to get their companies using this? I'm assuming those are the people you're talking to since devs can't just pick up and use this at work - lmk if I'm wrong.

Is it start with read-only, become SOC2 compliant and add more functionality from there or is it more nuanced than that?

[temp9988109]

Looks cool! A bit hesitant to try it out, though. Can you talk a bit about your privacy and security practices?

Do you (or do you plan to) use customer data (or prompts/results) for training? Do you ever read any of the customer's AWS data beyond what's strictly necessary for the functionality of the tool? What data do you retain?

I looked at your privacy policy but it's pretty generic.

[maccard]

I do the infra from our company. I _want_ them to train on our infra and everyone else's infra and to tell me what actually works and will solve my problem, not what my account manager recommends because AWS approve it. That's basically the value add of the tool.

[bfeynman]

... You seriously just tell people to deploy a stack with your IAM role that "has the least permissions possible" good luck lol. Another thin wrapper around open-ai that doesn't even do the heavy lifting (deploying a secure and trusted authenticated role to access resources that can be easily audited etc)

[cddotdotslash]

For what it’s worth, literally every vendor that operates in its customers’ AWS accounts does this. Create a cross account role, trust the vendor’s account, and give it read only permissions (although don’t use the built in “read only” role since that includes access to things like S3 objects.

[regiswilson]

Release engineer here. You can pretty easily audit the policy we use (Read-Only) and you can also add a permissions boundary if you want. We would love to get any feedback and improvements you can offer if you are inclined. We have a slack workspace users can join, check it out. https://release-ai.slack.com

[nodesocket]

Congratulations on the launch. I own and run a DevOps consulting company and being able to ask AWS billing questions or create CloudWatch notifications in human language is gonna be a game changer. Looking forward to using and following Releases progress. The .com domain name must have cost a fortune. lol

[quickthrower2]

I like the “talk to kubernetes” demo I can see that being useful and perhaps a new normal for command line interactions with tools. I wonder if it can help with security hardening recommendations? You might be able to do that in tandem with aqua security or similar.

[jakozaur]

I like the concept, but would love to hear if it's a feature or some long-term product vision.

It looks like the main business is Environment as a Service.

Do you see ReleaseAI as a new product? Is it related to Env as a service?

Or maybe you are considering to pivot?

[tommy_mcclung]

Tommy, CEO here. We believe it is incredibly complimentary to our core service. What we've found in building Release through our support channels is we spend a tremendous amount of time consulting with the DevOps teams of our customers answering questions like what can be answered with ReleaseAI. It helps us help ourselves and our customers. In the long run we see this being integrated into our core product in really interesting ways as well. There will always be a standalone version.

[mentos]

Really curious to know what led you to this project? When ChatGPT4 released did Bella start choking in your head with all of these possibilities?

[tommy_mcclung]

We spend a ton of time working directly with DevOps teams of our customers, helping them in using Release, but also just a lot of questions related to their infrastructure and AWS/GCP. We have some crazy good Integration Engineers that field a lot of this and we thought maybe AI could help free them up and scale That’s what sent us down this path.

[quickthrower2]

What is Bella a reference to?

[classified]

Sorry, Dave, I cannot allow you to do that.

[dgiffin]

Thanks for all of the feedback. I would love to get everyones ideas on what they would want Release AI to do for them. Please reply in the comments.

[BrandonWatson]

I've worked with Dave before. He will in fact implement ask the things in a very short period of time. We used to talk about him as the master of spinning developer plates.

[artursapek]

does your entire business depend on the OpenAI API? what happens if they close it down?

[regiswilson]

Release engineer here. No, this tool merely complements our core offerings and also has some use as a standalone tool. We can currently use any of the AI API offerings that are compatible; OpenAI is the one that is most common though. If they shut it down, a lot of people would have to migrate to a different provider but our tool could still work.

[annika88]

Can't wait to try it!

[irynakm]

Weekend project!

[samstave]

Love it.

Funny, while I was reading the site, I was wondering if you could build crons on it - and that was the last example :-)

Some cool things I'd like to try would be:

"Create an alert whenever [EVENT] happens and contact [whomever]"

"Give me a system summary every morning at 9:15 AM called "Stand-up Status"

"Summarize all events for [OBJECT] each [TIME PERIOD] and send a report daily at X"

"Give the CFO a daily spend report each morning"

-

Can it do things like this?

[NickBusey]

Release engineer here.

With the exception of the first example (I'm not sure how good it would be at event monitoring like that, though we're absolutely going to try it out!), I think all of these should work. We've tested the daily spend report already.

Give it a shot and let us know how it works for you!