Product Hunt Follow-up and What’s coming next
If you were following Dockbit last week, you probably know that we launched our public beta. On Wednesday, Zach Holman (thanks, Zach!) hunted us down on Product Hunt and Dockbit went viral. We made it to the front page, got a good number of signups, and most importantly, received awesome feedback. We would like to thank you all who jumped into the discussion, signed up and provided your valuable feedback. 💜 It’ll definitely help us make Dockbit even better for you!
Perhaps the most intriguing discovery was to find out how many people were blown away by the simplicity of Dockbit and its potential. We aimed to show that software deployments do not have to be hard, even if there are many tools involved in your deployment pipelines. You’ve seen how easy it is with Dockbit to connect various services together, in one place, and let your entire team deploy with a single Slack command.
We think we’re onto something here, but acknowledge that Dockbit needs additional things to support more complex workflows. In this post, I would like to briefly summarize the most requested features and what we are doing about them.
Documentation
Although we provided context help (tooltips) throughout the app, many of you found it difficult to set the things up without proper docs in place. Dockbit is a bit too magical at times, so we admit the need for more explicit guidance. We are working on our documentation site and it’s one of our top priorities.
Environment variables
Some of you have managed to set environment variables inline with your deployment commands. However, this is definitely not the best way to handle them, so we will be adding a Secure Store for your pipeline credentials and other settings, and will let you share them across any of your pipelines.
GitHub auto-deploys and branches
Wouldn’t it be great to associate your Git branches with the Dockbit pipelines and let them be deployed automatically, upon a Git merge or the resolution of a GitHub Pull Request? Well, that’s exactly what some of you requested and we think it’s a great feature, which we will be bringing on to Dockbit.
Docker support
Every stage of your deployment pipeline runs in an isolated Docker container. These containers are based on our internal Docker images, which we’ll be open-sourcing soon. However, many of you wished to build your own Docker images and upload them to Docker Hub or Amazon ECR, as part of your deployment pipelines. We certainly see the benefit of having Docker as one of our supported integrations, so it’s going to be available as well.
Pricing
Finally, some of you wanted to know our prices for additional pipelines. We’re still working on our pricing model and will be announcing it soon. We want to come up with the most sensible pricing for our users. In the meanwhile, if you want to have more pipelines for your team, feel free to contact us and we will be glad to increase the limits.
Thanks again and stay tuned for the updates!
