[HN Gopher] Show HN: Release AI - Talk to Your Infrastructure
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Show HN: Release AI - Talk to Your Infrastructure
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 david@release.com 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!
Author : dgiffin
Score : 91 points
Date : 2023-08-25 16:20 UTC (6 hours ago)
| samstave wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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!
| samstave wrote:
| For the first one, maybe an Intrusion Detection
|
| "Alert me anytime someon attempts to login to [SENSITIVE
| SYSTEM]
|
| -
|
| Can this do SPLUNK like log analytics?
|
| "Give me a table of all activity of [TYPE] in [THESE
| LOGS/SYSTEMS]" (for whatever metric youre tracking)
|
| "Give me a cron of uptime every hour for [system, site,
| cluster, whatever]"
|
| "create a status page for critical systems A B C X Y Z"
|
| --
|
| I dont have any AWS infra to throw this at right now - but I
| do love this
|
| As a Dir. Of DevOps in my career - these were very common
| questions thrown at me on the regular from PMs, C-suite,
| engineering etc...
|
| So if this were a self-service query portal for teams with
| permissions/roles on what sort of questions could be asked
| from other teams that would be cool.
|
| this is read only? It cant deploy/launch/buy services can it?
| lmeyerov wrote:
| re:splunk (and opensearch, databricks, etc), we're already
| doing those with louie.ai and running early self-hosted +
| saas cohorts. Your questions are very much the type we'd
| interested in exploring with you! Feel free to signup on
| our early access program on the site or reach out directly
| (leo@graphistry.com).
| NickBusey wrote:
| Since this is currently talking to AWS and k8s directly,
| unless you are setup in a way that would let AWS know about
| the intrusion detection, then this is likely out of scope
| for now.
|
| Similar to the logs/systems access. If AWS or k8s can read
| the logs, there is a chance we can crunch them, if they are
| in a separate logging platform, we would currently be
| unable to fetch that information. Great ideas for future
| features though!
|
| It is currently read only yes.
| itsderek23 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| That's an impressive article and a lot of good work put into
| it!
| jakozaur wrote:
| 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?
| [deleted]
| tommy_mcclung wrote:
| 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.
| [deleted]
| tikkun wrote:
| 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'.
| tommy_mcclung wrote:
| Done
| regiswilson wrote:
| 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.
| halfba wrote:
| [dead]
| nodesocket wrote:
| 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
| mentos wrote:
| 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?
| temp9988109 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| samstave wrote:
| Exactly.
|
| It would be interesting if just like an AI coding assistant,
| this would be a DevOPs/SRE/Infra assistant, whereby you can
| also just do your regular CI/CD/deployments/whatever - and
| have it make recommendations on caveats based on other
| architectures, or such.
|
| e.g.
|
| "describe examples for an architecture to accomplish X" and
| it spits out some examples - then you can choose, and save
| these "Infra-Prompts" and then later say
|
| "generate a new sand-box based on X and connect it to such-
| and-such and notify USERA when their environment is
| available, include a status page, and alert cron and a
| costing line in the daily CFO report" etc
| tommy_mcclung wrote:
| Love this.
| bfeynman wrote:
| ... 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 wrote:
| 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.
| baq wrote:
| At my current job I can trigger a pipeline to deploy a
| complex set of cloud formation stacks but my account doesn't
| have access to logs of those deployments. Devops!
| regiswilson wrote:
| 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
| annika88 wrote:
| Can't wait to try it!
| swozey wrote:
| 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.
| voz_ wrote:
| What is a Platarch?
| swozey wrote:
| As mentioned platform architect. I work on the research,
| design and construction of PaaS systems (which usually
| include SaaS as well, the backend of what lambdas or
| "functions" etc run on).
|
| PaaS being Platform as a Service (think GKE/EKS/A...KS?)
| Melatonic wrote:
| How did you get into that originally ?
| 4ggr0 wrote:
| Platform Architect :)
| regiswilson wrote:
| 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.!
| swozey wrote:
| I'll throw you a big bone, I just cut our nearly
| $million/month aws infra costs down 45% by switching from x86
| to arm64. So factor that in for sure. I was _hoping_ for
| 15-25%.
| regiswilson wrote:
| Fantastic, we've already begun switching RDS instances to
| Arm64 (simple, easy, and effective), but still haven't
| cracked (yet) building for Arm64 compute containers in a
| safe and effective way. I love it!
| Ocha wrote:
| What about arm64 makes building containers in a safe and
| effective way harder compared to x86?
| Michelangelo11 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Release engineer here. You can do a bunch of cool tricks like
| go into `/expert` mode and view all the details. Join our
| slack workspace (https://release-ai.slack.com) and we have
| tonnes more tricks and techniques to share!
| regiswilson wrote:
| 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.
| JimDabell wrote:
| > But we've still seen it say some crazy things, like "Your
| cluster is fine" when it clearly wasn't. :tounge-sticking-
| out-emoji:
|
| It's difficult to take you seriously when you write like this
| about show-stopping bugs.
| regiswilson wrote:
| I was referring to problems we found during initial
| development, but I appreciate that I didn't clarify that
| well.
| tommy_mcclung wrote:
| Tommy, CEO here. We also have some ideas on reporting
| hallucinations and feeding wrong answers back into the
| prompts automatically to help reduce instances of
| hallucinations. We have a few other ideas and would welcome
| any ideas folks have to help with this problem.
| frankohn wrote:
| You need to engineer a system when the AI state something it
| has to give a command that should support what it says and
| explain how the command shows that it is true. At this point
| the command should be really executed and its output or error
| fed yo the AI so that it can confirm the statements or
| correct it.
|
| I am crazy how they think a system with no feedback loop can
| be always accurate. Only perfect mathematics can work like
| this, any -like system need to have a feedback loop.
| regiswilson wrote:
| Excellent idea, we do internally feed the answers back to
| the system to improve its own inputs and outputs. The
| funniest part of some of this experience has been to find
| cases where even humans were hallucinating: "Hey, I thought
| this was shutdown?!" or "I can't find the bucket!" Even on
| a bad day, the humans are still ahead though.
| say_it_as_it_is wrote:
| How about applying good old fashioned bean counting?
| Michelangelo11 wrote:
| Thanks for the answer. Yeah, that's pretty much what I
| expected would be the case. Speaking as another dev in the AI
| space, it seems like reliability and consistency are the
| hardest issues when it comes to making AI genuinely useful in
| production vs. just a neat toy, and there's no stock
| solution.
| artursapek wrote:
| does your entire business depend on the OpenAI API? what happens
| if they close it down?
| regiswilson wrote:
| 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.
| dgiffin wrote:
| 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.
| classified wrote:
| Sorry, Dave, I cannot allow you to do that.
| welder wrote:
| "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 wrote:
| "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...
| loa_in_ wrote:
| You're very lucky if there's an up to date diagram and you
| got confidence in it's correctness.
| throwaway290 wrote:
| Like a hand-made diagram? That's a blast from the past...
|
| I mean a diagram generated directly from your actual infra
| using the same APIs as the chatbot
| regiswilson wrote:
| 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.
| whalesalad wrote:
| "how much money am i wasting per minute on this huge disk just to
| achieve high iops?"
| regiswilson wrote:
| Relase AI Bot: "Try switching to gp3, you will save money and
| likely see a performance boost!"
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