> We realized that a better approach would be to abstract away the specifics of each environment by using infra-as-code as middleware. Infra-as-code solutions like Terraform, CloudFormation, etc. can represent infrastructure thoroughly in a standardized fashion. The majority of people we talked to were maintaining their infrastructure using Terraform or something similar, and it was easy to build out pipelines for those who didn't by using Terraform under the hood. This was the key to what became Gallery.
The problem you're trying to solve definitely exists, don't get me wrong; but the level of effort required to integrate with your service sounds more like a high-touch consultant-level engagement (definitely sounds enterprise-y and expensive). I'm not sure how you can scale this as a self-serve SaaS business.
You're right; distribution is one of the biggest challenges for a service like this. There's a bit of a tradeoff in my eyes; you can either support a few setups with seamless self-service, or you can support everyone but on a case-by-case basis. We think that the IaC approach bridges the two; our goal at the moment isn't to rush to fully hands-free self-service, but rather to optimize for the range of configurations we're compatible with and how seamlessly we can support clients on those stacks.
Using IaC helps a lot with the former, and getting experience onboarding different clients has helped with the latter - we're now familiar with common hangups (e.g. figuring out the data layer), and we've built processes into the product to get around those (e.g. immediately populating a test DB from a specified staging DB). We've seen progress in how quickly we can get people onto the platform; it now generally only takes a day, and we're bringing full self-service in sight as that duration decreases.
That being said, our broader goal is to hit the larger enterprise market, for which (as you mentioned) a higher-touch approach is warranted.
The problem you're trying to solve definitely exists, don't get me wrong; but the level of effort required to integrate with your service sounds more like a high-touch consultant-level engagement (definitely sounds enterprise-y and expensive). I'm not sure how you can scale this as a self-serve SaaS business.