Distr 2.0: Lessons from a Year of Shipping Software to Customer Environments
Distr, a platform designed to help software vendors manage customer deployments remotely, has released version 2.0 after a year of real-world learning. The original launch featured agents that pulled updates and a hub with a GUI, but the team quickly discovered that managing software in environments you can't SSH into presents unexpected challenges.
Over the past year, the team has worked with customers to modernize ad-hoc deployment solutions — replacing bash scripts that email on failure, Excel spreadsheets used to track customer versions, and other homegrown tools that teams had outgrown. The 2.0 release incorporates these hard-won lessons about what on-prem and customer-hosted deployment actually requires in practice.
Over the past year, the team has worked with customers to modernize ad-hoc deployment solutions — replacing bash scripts that email on failure, Excel spreadsheets used to track customer versions, and other homegrown tools that teams had outgrown. The 2.0 release incorporates these hard-won lessons about what on-prem and customer-hosted deployment actually requires in practice.