I finally created an account because your comment resonated with me. I have created 95% of my platform by myself which itself was the manifestation of several business ideas. I started out buying servers and starting a dedicated, then vps, then shared hosting farm that requires all of the frontends you mention. I took a different approach, I went all out open-source and spent time creating glue and flashy bootstrap frontends to orchestrate everything reliably.
I currently run the remains of my companies as a lab that is spread out to a few datacenters and provides a UX where anyone can request a VM, launch a container, or drop a php/java war/RoR/django/etc onto a custom app server of varying security restrictions. You can request a service/vm/container by API, by chat, or any other host of events through my half-baked event controller and change mgmt database. In a lot of cases, changes are a two-way street. You can modify e.g. a bind zone file and that will reflect upwards in a CMDB or vice-versa and watch the zone file update automagically. The original idea was to allow mixing sysadmin strengths and still maintain a reliable complex system.
So now I have a platform that spans multiple datacenters, uses infra as code as you would expect (supporting another cloud provider is simply adding glue to their apis), has loadbalancing and SSO, and it's just literally sitting on the sidelines exhausting the remaining budget until I finally get tired and liquidate it all. The motivation of building a business on it is so tiny after years of failed attempts and seeing the shared cloud model completely destroy ROI on holding hardware. I can and have built e.g. fleet tracking services. I have gobs of storage, so I run an object store for giggles. But have no clue how to generate revenue from these ideas when the market is already saturated. My last ditch idea is to create a learning ground for the public. Training on how to build apps that scale, manage systems at scale, and give a real world environment to folks who may otherwise not work at an organization with more than 100 servers. shrug . until then I chop-chop away at my dayjob :)
There are people who create consumer products, and there are people who create the products that power those products. It's no different to when id Software sold licences of their engines to other game developers. Perhaps you can turn your infrastructure into a business of its own.
I currently run the remains of my companies as a lab that is spread out to a few datacenters and provides a UX where anyone can request a VM, launch a container, or drop a php/java war/RoR/django/etc onto a custom app server of varying security restrictions. You can request a service/vm/container by API, by chat, or any other host of events through my half-baked event controller and change mgmt database. In a lot of cases, changes are a two-way street. You can modify e.g. a bind zone file and that will reflect upwards in a CMDB or vice-versa and watch the zone file update automagically. The original idea was to allow mixing sysadmin strengths and still maintain a reliable complex system.
So now I have a platform that spans multiple datacenters, uses infra as code as you would expect (supporting another cloud provider is simply adding glue to their apis), has loadbalancing and SSO, and it's just literally sitting on the sidelines exhausting the remaining budget until I finally get tired and liquidate it all. The motivation of building a business on it is so tiny after years of failed attempts and seeing the shared cloud model completely destroy ROI on holding hardware. I can and have built e.g. fleet tracking services. I have gobs of storage, so I run an object store for giggles. But have no clue how to generate revenue from these ideas when the market is already saturated. My last ditch idea is to create a learning ground for the public. Training on how to build apps that scale, manage systems at scale, and give a real world environment to folks who may otherwise not work at an organization with more than 100 servers. shrug . until then I chop-chop away at my dayjob :)