00:00:00 · Will Stewart, Jack
[00:00:00] S0: So how does a team of 18 people build such a horizontal complex platform and make it work consistently across all of these platforms? How does it? Brute force. Right? Hey, everyone. [00:00:10] S1: You're listening to Scaling Dev Tools. I'm joined today by my friend Will who is the cofounder and CEO of North Flank. We're gonna get into what North Flank does in just a second. We talk about building a platform that runs complex developer workflows, how Will met his cofounder, which is a very interesting story. We talk about the balance between building something very reliable while shipping fast, And we also talk about stuff like how to update your users about what you've just built and responding to feedback. Enjoy the episode. [00:00:36] S0: So Northlink is a well, first of all, we're a UK based startup. So great to be here in person with you. [00:00:42] S1: That's true. We're in a farm right now.
00:00:45 · Will Stewart, Jack
[00:00:45] S0: We are in a farmhouse. It it it's it's great because obviously you you started the UK DevTools meetup. So it's it's great to be here and and chatting with you today. And we've had this in person friendship for such a long time and finally get to be here. Northflank is a self-service developer platform. That's the the core principle. And our primary objective is to help teams deploy the most critical workloads to production. We speak Kubernetes, so Northflank can run on any Kubernetes cluster. And that means that we can run anything from microservices to databases to message queues all the way to inference training. Pretty much we're a polyglot platform, which means we try and run everything, and we're in the post commit phase of the development life cycle. So as soon as an engineer is pushed to version control, Northlink takes over from build, deploy, release, auto scaling, disaster recovery. And this primary happens in in your VPC. So if you want to use GCP, AWS, Azure, Oracle, CoreWeave, Northland can run on top of your Kubernetes clusters. But of course, we're not just building for enterprises and and and your VPC. We also operate as a PaaS. Ultimately, that's our DNA. The developer experience is essentially a platform as a service. And in in doing so, someone can sign up in a couple of seconds, deploy services, and then later they could graduate to their own VPC or on prem. And that's that's where we are today. Obviously, it's taken we we founded Northlink in 2019, and it's it's taken us to this point. [00:02:19] S1: Yeah. Actually, one of things
00:02:19 · Jack, Will Stewart
[00:02:19] S1: Yeah. Actually, one of things [00:02:20] S0: I wanted to ask you about is quite I always found it very unusual. It's like how you met your cofounder with that story and then maybe you could start with that and then transition on the actual story of North Flank. Yeah. Absolutely. So my cofounder and I so I'm the cofounder and CEO and Fred is my CTO. We've known each other for a very very long time, maybe, I don't know, thirteen, fourteen, fifteen years, however long it is now. Can't remember exactly. But we mess in our multiplayer game. So I I had been trying to build a number of gaming communities as you do as a kid. You, you know, make a clan, you try and make a small gaming community. [00:02:55] S1: Which game? [00:02:57] S0: Mount and Blade Warband. Warband? Yeah. It's quite a niche game on PC on Steam. [00:03:02] S1: But Yeah. What is it? [00:03:03] S0: It was a medieval RPG game where you could build mods. There were a number of mods we used to, you know, support host game servers, things like that. [00:03:12] S1: Yeah. Is it a little
00:03:12 · Jack, Will Stewart
[00:03:12] S1: Yeah. Is it a little [00:03:13] S0: bit like RuneScape or It's it's much more like it's it's it's more three d Okay. Than RuneScape. But I did play RuneScape as well. So we met online and then we started to build things together. So we started to build applications together. And Fred's not in The UK? No. He's he's German living in Switzerland. And we haven't spent that much time in person together. Like, probably maximum a hundred and twenty days across those thirteen, fifteen years, whatever. Yeah. We didn't meet until 2019. So it was already at that point. [00:03:55] S1: So you met when you started it. [00:03:57] S0: Right? So we met when we founded North Flank. Yeah. [00:04:00] S1: But you'd already decided to [00:04:02] S0: We'd already been building and working together for many many years. It's because we like we were kids, we couldn't afford to, you know, get on a flight and meet each other. So originally, you know, were on TeamSpeak. We were working on TeamSpeak. We were working on Skype. Like, literally, there are old Skype conversations of us collaborating, trying to figure out how to build build shit, and and then we obviously graduated to to WhatsApp and Discord and then and then eventually Slack. So so yeah, I think it was in 2019 we decided, okay, if we're gonna do this properly, we need to go and learn how to code. We're gonna have to do this properly rather than just be script kiddies. So we both went off to university. Fred went and did his masters in computer science.
00:04:02 · Will Stewart, Jack
[00:04:02] S0: We'd already been building and working together for many many years. It's because we like we were kids, we couldn't afford to, you know, get on a flight and meet each other. So originally, you know, were on TeamSpeak. We were working on TeamSpeak. We were working on Skype. Like, literally, there are old Skype conversations of us collaborating, trying to figure out how to build build shit, and and then we obviously graduated to to WhatsApp and Discord and then and then eventually Slack. So so yeah, I think it was in 2019 we decided, okay, if we're gonna do this properly, we need to go and learn how to code. We're gonna have to do this properly rather than just be script kiddies. So we both went off to university. Fred went and did his masters in computer science. [00:04:48] S1: When you'd already when you say like, if we're gonna build this, like, we need to learn how to code, like, as in you'd already had like this, like, specific North Flank idea?
00:04:58 · Will Stewart
[00:04:58] S0: So that in like twenty thirteen, fourteen, fifteen, we were manually deploying game servers on bare metal on like OVH and Hetzner back in the day. Obviously, now Hetzner's now the hottest thing and everyone wants to deploy Well, you were deploying Yeah. We were then, we were like using our pocket money to spawn bare metal machines using, you know, SSH in and then try and run some game servers. And we were doing that in No thirteen, fourteen, whatever it was. And this is when public cloud just wasn't very available or couldn't even run game servers because the CPUs weren't fast enough or or whatever. And also the network was really expensive. So we we we were provisioning these these bare metal servers, we're like, this is crazy, this this needs to change. And of course, every new game came out, and the multiplayer was always offline because game developers didn't know how to build an infrastructure platform. So we thought, okay, well, why don't we try and build this? Why don't we try and build an automation system for these game servers? And then as time went on, we're like, okay, well, we need to deploy a back end. So we needed to go and deploy a database and a microservice. We looked around and the only thing at the time, you know, was Heroku. I had been acquired by Salesforce and it hadn't evolved. Like, I think at the time, you can even deploy a Docker image. So we we thought we needed something more accessible. And of course, at that time, we'd learn containers, we'd learn Docker. And then Ben, sorry.