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Unvalidated Ideas #051

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Here's a fresh idea you can take out there and validate.

Ephemeral Kubernetes clusters aaS (🗒Raw Notes)

Kubernetes was the future, and the future is now. As the industry around Kubernetes continues to grow (it's already quite big), one thing that people increasingly require is more Kubernetes clusters.

💼 🧠 Build an infrastructure provider that does one thing -- ephemeral Kubernetes clusters

This idea is both somewhat technically challenging and niche, not for the faint of engineering. It does risk being too niche -- but this is partially solved by the rapid and continuing growth of the kubernetes ecosystem.

You've got a rolodex of customers out there who are likely to have this very specific problem -- the companies and projects tied to Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) (and in general, the CNCF itself).

While I won't go into exactly what the CNCF is here -- many open source projects under it's umbrella which receive funding and other benefits but they are all very focused on building "cloud-native" applications -- these days that often means that the applications run well in a container-first environment (like Kubernetes). This means those orgs often need to test in a Kubernetes environment as easily and cheaply as possible.

Maybe the CNCF is too amorphous an organization for you -- did you know that Mercedes runs 900 Kubernetes clusters? Chick-Fil-A has 1000s of clusters as well (they're mostly per-store). In addition to this, more and more educational resources try to spin up kubernetes clusters for users to learn on.

Most companies are not going to be excited about building a clean cheap solution for ephemeral clusters (if they haven't already built that system themselves). Solve that pain point for them.

That gets to the core of the innovation here -- more importantly than offering a k8s-as-a-service solution (EKS, AKS and GCP already offer that), what you're giving companies is a way to remove the headache of managing an ephemeral k8s environment.

What was in this week's uncut edition?

Like being teased? I hope so, because here's what was in the uncut edition this week:

Ideas:

Bonus:

Don't forget, there's always money in the banana stand 3x more in the uncut edition.

Thanks for reading!

If you liked this letter feel free to criticize, comment on, remix, and share these ideas with your fellow builders and entrepreneurs!

If email isn't your style, you can also get ideas 🐦 tweet by tweet.

Check out the archive for access to editions that have been previously released.

Victor (victor@unvalidatedideas.com)

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