We met as a team last night (Stephen Sigwart, Rich Friedman and Bob Bickel) and came to agreement we would form this company.  The idea sprang from our own efforts at RunSignUp to do load testing and feeling like Goldilocks – too soft/too hard, too hot, too cold.  So we developed something that was just right for our Cloud architecture.  We realized that this was something others might want as well – so we are generalizing it and going to release it to the market.

Our strategy is pretty simple.  It follows an open source type of business model where we will provide the service for (almost) free.  We will cover the fairly minimal costs (maybe a few $Thousand per year) for our Cloud Service, with customers providing their Amazon account to allow up to spin up spot instances to be the load agents.  Hence the customer can pay the charges of the actual load.  And this can be ridiculously cheap – $2.00 for 200 m1.smalls for an hour – enough to emulate well over 50,000 users hitting your site or application.

We hope that other Cloud Providers on Open Stack, as well as other PaaS and SaaS providers might want to offer this service themselves.  So we will license the technology for others to fork, take to market, private label and customize.

The name is based on a tachometer – we figure we are providing the foot to step on your website’s gas pedal and see where it redlines.  The 13 comes from the year we started, and of course to plant a seed of doubt in a devops person’s mind that they might be unlucky if they do not load test their site before they roll it out.