Company forgets why they exist after 11-week migration to Kubernetes

Xenobroom Inc., a young startup fresh out of Silicon Valley started a lengthy process of upgrading their server infrastructure back in May 2020. According to the remaining fragments of CEO's daily journal and CTO's engineering notes, the company enjoyed a sharp rise in daily use in the midst of the global pandemic. Soon after, the decision to migrate the existing infrastructure to Kubernetes was made.

It took longer than expected: simple bash scripts and mere VPS machines needed to be revamped, re-considered and re-engineered. Many at the company thought it's a good chance to upgrade software dependencies and libraries as well. A large part of a PostgreSQL database running on a single machine could as well be transformed into a distributed KV storage, leveraging the tremendous power of flexibility of AWS. Plain staging server running daily deployes from a 'develop' branch could be ditched in favor of a production-only CI-enabled workflow with dynamic routing, allowing seamless A/B-testing and geo-dependency.

When the process was seemingly complete, nobody at the company could remember the purpose of their product anymore.

Unfortunately, neither users nor numerous investors can help in the situation. Both groups openly admit they could never quite understand the product in the first place, and today, after weeks of downtime, it is virtually impossible to restore the meaning.

The CEO now seeks help from Phutar Afrayughum, a psychic and extrasensory perception specialist who allegedly helped Google increase their marketshare in the messaging app market, and was also involved in developing the Material Design framework.