How Clouddley is reimagining the heart of the internet

Photo courtesy of Obinna Odirionye

Opinions expressed by Digital Journal contributors are their own.

Startups are everywhere. Let’s say you’re building a cloud-based photo editing and storage platform for professional photographers. Let’s also say you know how to code, or you’ve at least hired someone who does. You’ve programmed all the necessary parts of the application — the photo-editing capabilities, the user interface, the storage menu, and all the other moving parts. 

Now, your customers just have to download the program, right? Wrong. You’re missing a few key parts of the puzzle. You don’t know the first thing about the cloud or the different cloud platforms. You don’t even know how you’re going to roll out future updates to your application.

So now what? You could always hire an expert in cloud-native applications, a DevOps engineer who packages up your code into neat little containers, allowing you to change and update parts as quickly as you might swap camera lenses, and then does the dirty work of turning your code into a real application in the cloud. This expert will come with a hefty price tag, and that’s before you pay for the cloud storage space your platform will need. Not to mention, you’ll have to teach this new guy how to work with your code. What a nightmare.

If you don’t take the cloud-native approach, you’ll have to find a space to build your own servers and hope that whatever infrastructure you set up will handle your needs — lest you find yourself needing to start from the beginning with a bigger building.

Or, you could learn a little bit about how the cloud works and turn to a service like Clouddley Triggr, which will store your program on a server, scale your cloud storage based on user traffic, automatically deploy your updates, and keep your data safe.

The best part is that you won’t have to hire an expert or buy a building. Depending on your business needs, you could be paying just a few dollars to expertly manage your applications, after importing your code directly from GitHub.

How it all started

Can it really be that easy? Well, it wasn’t always this way. Obinna Odirionye was working as a DevOps engineer in college when the idea for Clouddley came about. 

DevOps is a method that employs extensive automation and collaboration to help connect a software’s development and IT operations teams. This system allows a company to make changes to its programs quickly in response to customers’ needs and reported issues.

Despite the flexibility that comes with DevOps, it isn’t easy to get applications running on the cloud. There’s complex code involved for things like CI/CD pipelines, which automate the building, testing, and deployment of applications. Moving code to a cloud computing platform is an arduous task.

One night, Odirionye was chatting with a friend about the challenges in his line of work. 

“What if we were able to make it easier for people to deploy infrastructure?” He said on a whim, “Like, just click this. Click these things and you’re done.”

This was the idea that led to Clouddley, a platform that’d allow its users to do just that.

Obinna Odirionye

Not long after that conversation, Odirionye quit his job as a Senior Site Reliability Engineer and began working on the idea in earnest. He and his co-founder launched Clouddley in January 2023.

Odirionye was able to build a platform that did everything thanks to his extensive experience in the industry.

At 24, he’d just graduated college, and had worked for top companies like ClipboardHealth and SAP, building up expertise in cloud-native technologies. He even once served as a CNCF ambassador. 

Odirionye’s DevOps experience, cloud certifications, and industry background working on large-scale applications gave him the knowledge he needed to build his innovative idea into a real company.

He wanted to create a platform that gave small startups all the same abilities as industry leaders, without draining their limited resources.

How Clouddley does it

With the press of a few buttons, Clouddley Triggr lets you import your code from GitHub, connect to your virtual machine, and deploy your app to the cloud. It uses modern infrastructure to effortlessly build software systems and automatically roll back your apps if they fail to work.

The secret is that most of Clouddley’s functions are automated, a strategy Odirionye brought to the table from his DevOps experience. With a team of only five people and the goal of making services accessible to small startups, automation is key. It’s this automation that also allows users to schedule automatic, reliable, and efficient deployments and updates.

However, modern cloud platforms get pretty expensive with bandwidth and cost of computing. That’s why, in order to make cloud deployment even more cost-effective and effortless, Clouddley is building its own managed cloud platform which allows customers to run their apps and databases with ease.

With this suite of powerful tools, even a small tech startup can get its code out into the world with the cloud support that bigger companies typically have.

The future of startups

Now let’s get back to your hypothetical photo editing and storage platform. Your code is ready. You’ve scrounged together seven dollars and opened Triggr. You click this, you click that, and your code is in. You decide when you want your app to release. That’s it. You’re done. When the deployment date rolls around, you’ll get an email about your app’s status. Now, you have a product, and all you need to do is sell it.

You probably aren’t making a cloud-based photo editing and storage platform for professional photographers. You might be sitting on a different idea. But when it’s this easy, why not do it?