At SaltStack, we built one of the most widely-used open source DevOps tools in the world. Thousands of enterprises deployed Salt to manage their infrastructure, including LinkedIn, eBay, Salesforce.com, Bloomberg, Adobe, Hulu, and TD Bank. We tested Salt's ability to manage a million minions. We proved that enterprise-scale infrastructure automation was possible.
Our success came from making the largest and most complex infrastructures easy to manage while scaling to massive deployments. Salt could handle anything you threw at it—thousands of servers, complex networking configurations, and multi-cloud deployments across every major platform.
But we struggled with something fundamental: helping customers understand how easy it was to get started.
Here's the irony: we built Salt to make infrastructure management simpler. But because we talked about managing hundreds of thousands of servers and enterprise-scale deployments, smaller teams assumed it wasn't for them. The power we demonstrated at scale made people think setup would be complicated.
They saw "manages 100,000 servers" and thought "not for my 10-server deployment."
They heard "enterprise-grade" and assumed "enterprise-complexity."
We knew Salt was straightforward to set up. We knew it worked beautifully for small deployments. But the market perception was set: this was an enterprise tool, which meant it must be hard to use.
By 2019-2020, we started changing that narrative with SaltStack SecOps. We built a product that delivered enterprise-grade security automation with a dramatically simpler experience. It won awards at RSA 2020—recognized as Vulnerability Management Solution of the Year. We finally had a product that showed you could have both enterprise capability and developer-friendly experience.
Great product. Terrible timing. RSA 2020 was when COVID broke out. Our momentum vanished in the lockdown months. Then we were acquired by VMware, and eventually Broadcom.
But the lesson stayed with me: getting the end goal right from the beginning is critical.
The current wave of developer experience platforms has learned from tools like SaltStack. They've nailed the onboarding experience. They've made deployment delightfully simple. Developers love using them.
But many of these platforms are making the opposite mistake that we made.
They're optimizing so heavily for ease-of-use that they're building toys, not tools. They're so focused on making things simple that they're leaving out the complexity enterprises actually need. They promise you won't outgrow them, but their databases explicitly come with no SLAs and are "not suitable for anything mission-critical". Their infrastructure is great for hobby projects and startups, but starts showing cracks when you hit real scale.
The developer experience is beautiful, but the enterprise capabilities simply aren't there.
So you get teams in a painful position: they start with a platform that's easy to use, they build their product, they start to scale—and then they have to migrate everything to "real" infrastructure. They have to learn AWS or Azure or GCP. They have to hire DevOps engineers. They have to rebuild what they had, but at enterprise scale.
The DX platform becomes technical debt they have to pay down.
At ContextOS, we're starting with a different end goal: enterprise-grade infrastructure that's approachable by anyone.
Not "enterprise tools with a better UI." Not "simple tools that might work at scale." Enterprise infrastructure—proper configuration, auto-scaling, production-ready from day one—that developers actually want to use.
This isn't theoretical. We've done this before. The team at ContextOS has deep experience building infrastructure that scales. Tom created Salt and SaltStack. I led product at IBM Tivoli, SaltStack, VMware, and Broadcom. Our development team has built infrastructures at the biggest and best companies in the world. We've seen what enterprise infrastructure requires. We've watched applications grow from dozens of servers to hundreds of thousands.
We know what breaks at scale. We know what security teams demand. We know what compliance frameworks require. We know what happens when your infrastructure can't keep up with your application's success.
And we're building all of that in from the beginning.
Here's what ContextOS looks like in practice:
You connect your repository. Answer a couple simple questions about your infrastructure needs. Then we provision everything – databases, caching, frontend hosting, background workers – you focus on your app and we will provide enterprise ready infrastructure!
Not "we'll give you a database with no SLAs." We provision a properly-configured, production-ready database. Not "we'll give you basic networking." We implement zero-trust networking with proper security from the start. Not "we'll give you auto-scaling if you configure it." We auto-scale intelligently based on actual usage patterns.
As your application grows, we grow with it. More users? We scale up. Traffic spike? We handle it. Quiet period? We scale down to save costs. Regional expansion? We deploy to new regions.
You focus on building your application. We handle the infrastructure.
But unlike the current generation of developer platforms, you'll never hit a wall where you outgrow us. Because we're not building for the hobbyist and hoping it works for enterprises. We're building for enterprises and making sure it's delightful for everyone.
The next generation of successful companies won't be built by teams who are experts in Kubernetes and Terraform. They'll be built by teams who focus relentlessly on their product while their infrastructure just works.
But "just works" can't mean "works until you get successful." It needs to mean "works at any scale."
That's what we're building. Infrastructure that's simple enough for a solo developer to deploy in minutes, powerful enough to run the next unicorn, and enterprise-ready from the moment you push your first commit.
No compromises. No migration cliff. No choosing between developer experience and enterprise capabilities.
Just infrastructure that works—for everyone, at any scale, from day one.
Alex Peay is the COO of ContextOS. He previously led product management at SaltStack, VMware, and Broadcom, where he learned that the hardest problems in infrastructure aren't technical—they're about building the right thing from the beginning.
Keep up to date with our progress by following ContextOS on LinkedIn →