I’ve been asked quite a few times where the idea for scarlet came from, and as so often with this kind of thing, the answer is that it was born out of necessity: there simply wasn’t the tooling available to do what I needed to do. I’d noticed a common theme across various clients that I was consulting for: that the simplicity and ease that comes with using the cloud can be a double-edged sword. My clients typically had teams split over multiple time-zones, they relied heavily on deployment automation tools (like Terraform), and also used a lot of auto-scaling technologies (like Kubernetes).