Meet Stag: Make Safe Changes

Move Fast. Break nothing??

Before my co-founders and I left Tesla, we led architecture and operated many of the backend platforms. “Move fast and break things” was a cute fantasy on X for investors. The reality of that was a nightmare for every operator. No amount of testing, review, process, or architecture discipline fixed the gap between testing and reality. Teams would deploy a routine change, something would break, and the cycle would repeat.

After one terrible incident, an engineer trolled me to “Stop all the dumb s**t from happening.” I realized that seemingly impossible request was the final boss of IT. To do this we needed to see many moves ahead. We needed simulation, just like every other branch of engineering. If we were building an airplane, we'd want to simulate it before we flew it. So why can't we do that with IT?

Introducing Stag

Simulating complex environments at scale depends on a long-standing problem in math. This is the legendary multi-layer graph enumeration problem (https://arxiv.org/abs/1604.07724), a doubly-exponential-time monstrosity that people had long since given up on.

We aren’t wired to give up “because impossible.” We decided to solve it.

After thousands of hours, we developed a linear time solution that AI has never found. That’s all I’m saying on that, because trade secrets. But the results of this breakthrough are available today for you, and the rest of the world, to use.

Today, I’m ecstatic to officially announce Stag, a revolutionary change simulation platform for making safe IT changes. It builds a real-time mirror of your environments end-to-end and then simulates changes while you code. It tells you when a change is safe or unsafe, and how to fix it before you commit or deploy.

Move Fast. Break nothing!!

Stag solves endless practical problems in IT. Is that credential going to break something when you rotate it? Are those queries going to impact other apps using the same DB? Are your DNS, load balancers, and security setup correctly during failovers? Did that change accidentally open a security hole? These are the kinds of real world problems that ruin your sleep and Stag is here to help.

Here’s what you can do next:

1. I’m talking about Stag TOMORROW at Tech Field Day @ Kubecon! Come listen!
2. Just try it today! Walk through a change with our engineers to understand the power of simulation.
3. We’re hiring. If you don’t give up when everyone says it’s impossible, we’re your people! Please reach out.