Here's a quick comparison of how Gruntwork compares to the two most common alternatives you may consider: doing it yourself and hiring a consultant.

DevOps is a classic case of "death by a thousand cuts." To ship software, there are a thousand little details you have to get just right—how to set up your network topology, how to run a highly available and scalable server cluster, how to set up CI/CD, how to configure monitoring & alerting, how to manage secrets, and so on—and very few companies have the time, resources, or expertise to do this well.

At Gruntwork, we've already created all the infrastructure you need. In fact, if you hired a team of DevOps experts and had them do nothing but work on your infrastructure for several years, you'd most likely end up with code that looks almost exactly like the Infrastructure as Code Library and DevOps Foundations. But why waste all that time reinventing the wheel? For a fraction of the cost of a single full-time developer, you can get access to a library of proven, battle-tested code, as well as support, updates, and maintenance. You focus on your product; let us take care of the grunt work.

A Platform as a Service (PaaS) such as Heroku or Docker Cloud can be a great way to get started, as they hide all the infrastructure details from you, and provide a simple API for deploying your code. Unfortunately, for this very same reason, a PaaS tends to be a big bottleneck as you try to grow: without the ability to see and control the underlying infrastructure details, it becomes difficult to debug, scale, customize your infrastructure, and keep costs under control.

As a result, most software companies eventually migrate to an Infrastructure as a Service provider (IaaS) such as AWS, Google Cloud, or Azure. This gives you full control over your infrastructure, but the downside is a massive increase in complexity. Suddenly, you have to deal with thousands of little infrastructure details—how to set up your network topology, how to run a highly available and scalable server cluster, how to set up CI/CD, how to configure monitoring & alerting, how to manage secrets, and so on—and very few companies have the time, resources, or expertise to do this well.

Our goal at Gruntwork is to allow you to take advantage of the full control and power of an IaaS while still having the ease-of-use of a PaaS. By using the Infrastructure as Code Library, you get a simple API for complicated infrastructure; for example, you can deploy a Kafka cluster or configure CI/CD or even deploy your entire architecture in just a few lines of code. And since all of this infrastructure is backed by code, you can easily debug, scale, and customize things as much as you want.

When you become a Gruntwork Subscriber, each user license will allow one human or machine user to access our Infrastructure as Code Library, Devops Foundations seat plus our community and paid support services.

The Gruntwork Subscription is valid for one company to use to manage its own infrastructure. If you are an agency or reseller that manages infrastructure for other companies, please contact us to discuss licensing options.

For monthly billing, we require automated payments via credit card or ACH transfer. If you wish to use invoices and pay by wire transfer or check instead, you must do annual billing. We also accept AWS Marketplace for annual contracts.

Yes, please reach out to sales@gruntwork.io.

A user is any human or machine that makes use of Gruntwork's services, including accessing code from the Infrastructure as Code Library or submitting requests to support.

You can cancel at any time and your subscription will end when your monthly or annual term expires.

As long as you subscribe for at least one 12-month period, you can keep using all the Gruntwork Library code you previously accessed, even if you cancel the subscription. However, you will lose access to new features, updates, and support.

See "What happens to my code if I cancel my subscription?" for more info.

If you cancel within the first 30 days, we'll refund 100% of your money and let you out of the annual subscription, but you lose the license to the code in the Infrastructure as Code Library, so you must stop using it and delete all copies of the code.

After 30 days please refer to your service agreement with Gruntwork to identify whether your contract specifies whether you have already been granted an indefinite license to the code, or have the option to purchase an indefinite license. In addition, you'll no longer have access to the updates, additions, and fixes we make to the Infrastructure as Code Library, support from the Gruntwork team, security alerts, and any other subscription benefits. However, your infrastructure will continue to work just fine and you'll still have all the code you had been using up to that point.