The Light Cloud Roadmap: A 5-Step Program for Cloud Recovery

"This Will Take Two Weeks," She Said, Weeping

People keep asking me about the Light Cloud roadmap. Investors want timelines. Beta users want features. My therapist wants to know why I twitch every time someone says "scope creep."

So here it is. The official Light Cloud roadmap. Five steps from "scrappy MVP" to "enterprise cloud domination." Complete with the delusion, optimism, and questionable life choices that got us here.

Buckle up. This is going to be honest.

Step 1: The MVP

Status: Live and slightly feral

Let's start with what exists right now. The MVP. The Minimum Viable Product. The "please dear god let this work in the demo" version.

Here's what we built: imagine if Render and Vercel had a very productive weekend together, and nine months later they produced a child that actually understood databases.

That's ICE MVP.

What it does:

• Push code -> it deploys. That's it. That's the tweet.
• Connect a database without writing 47 lines of YAML
• CI/CD that doesn't require a PhD in GitHub Actions
• Works with Node.js, Python, and PHP (more coming, I promise)

The philosophy: Deployment should feel like ordering coffee, not filing taxes.

You know what took the longest to build? The "it just works" part. Making something simple is stupidly hard. We spent three weeks on a feature that users will never notice because the whole point is that they DON'T notice it. They just push code and it deploys.

I told my advisor Cristina this would take "maybe two weeks." She laughed. She's worked with me before.

It took two months.

But here's the thing-every startup needs this foundation. Not the Kubernetes-flavored nightmare that AWS wants to sell you. Not the "just spin up an EKS cluster" that costs $73/month before you deploy a single container. Just... deployment. Simple, fast, predictable deployment.

Timeline estimate: Done (only 6 weeks behind schedule, which in startup time is basically early)

Step 2: ICE Light + The Visual Editor

Status: In development, consuming my weekends

This is where things get interesting. And by "interesting," I mean "the reason I haven't seen sunlight in three weeks."

ICE Light introduces the visual editor. Drag-and-drop infrastructure. The thing that should have existed ten years ago but didn't because cloud providers make more money when you're confused.

Picture this: You want a web app with an API, a database, and a Redis cache. Current approach? Open 14 browser tabs. Read 6 tutorials. Write YAML that looks like abstract poetry. Pray.

ICE Light approach: Drag "Web App" block. Drag "API" block. Drag "Database" block. Draw lines between them. Click deploy. Go touch grass.

Features coming:

• Visual infrastructure canvas (like Figma, but for servers)
• Real-time cost estimation as you build (drag a database, watch the price update)
• One-click connections between services
• Cloud Blocks - standardized, reusable infrastructure components (database block, auth block, queue block, cache block). Drag them in. They work. No configuration hell.
• Cloud Templates - full architecture patterns ready to deploy. Need a SaaS starter? E-commerce platform? API with auth and payments? One click. Done.
• Code Boilerplates - because infrastructure without code is just expensive empty servers. Each template comes with starter code. Node.js, Python, PHP. Clone, customize, ship.

The hard part nobody talks about: Making a visual editor that isn't just a toy. Every "visual infrastructure tool" I've tried feels like it was designed for a marketing demo, not actual work. Click three buttons and-wow!-you've deployed a "Hello World" app. Try to do anything real and suddenly you're back in the terminal.

We're building for developers who've been burned before. Developers who see "drag and drop" and immediately think "yeah, until I need to do something slightly unusual."

ICE Light will handle the unusual. Or I'll die trying. (My advisor says I shouldn't put that in writing. I'm keeping it.)

Optimistic timeline: Q2 2026 Realistic timeline: Q2 2026 + "a few extra weeks" Timeline I'm telling investors: Q2 2026

Step 3: ICE Light + More Cloud Providers (Or: The Polyamory Phase)

Status: Blueprints exist, implementation pending

Right now, ICE works with the Big Three: AWS, Google Cloud, Azure. But the whole point of ICE is that you shouldn't be locked into any of them.

Step 3 is about expansion. More providers. More options. More freedom.

Adding to the roster:

• DigitalOcean (for the indie hackers who don't need enterprise pricing for a blog)
• Linode/Akamai (solid, underrated, reasonably priced)
• Hetzner (European hosting that doesn't cost a kidney)
• Oracle Cloud (yes, really-their free tier is actually good, fight me)
• Alibaba Cloud (if you're doing business in China, you need this-no way around it)
• Tencent Cloud (800 million WeChat users aren't wrong)
• Huawei Cloud (growing fast, competitive pricing, strong in Asia and Europe)

Cloud Blocks & Templates go cross-provider:

This is where our standardized approach pays off. Every Cloud Block and Cloud Template from Step 2? They now work across every provider we support.

Built a SaaS starter on AWS? Deploy the same template to DigitalOcean. Literally the same template. We handle the translation.

Expanding the template library:

• SaaS Starter Kit - Auth, payments, user management, API, database. The stuff every SaaS needs. Stop rebuilding it.
• E-commerce Platform - Product catalog, cart, checkout, inventory. Shopify-like infrastructure without Shopify prices.
• API Backend - REST or GraphQL, authentication, rate limiting, logging. Production-ready from day one.
• Content Platform - CMS, media storage, CDN, caching. For blogs, portfolios, documentation sites.
• Real-time App - WebSockets, pub/sub, presence detection. Chat apps, dashboards, collaborative tools.

Each template ships with code boilerplates on GitHub. Clone the repo. Connect to ICE. Deploy. Your startup has infrastructure before your coffee gets cold.

Why this matters: Different projects need different providers. Your side project doesn't need AWS. Your European SaaS with GDPR requirements might need Hetzner. Your client who's irrationally loyal to Microsoft needs Azure.

ICE should work with all of them. Same interface. Same experience. Different backends.

The technical challenge: Every cloud provider invented their own special language for doing the exact same things. AWS calls it "Security Groups." Google calls it "Firewall Rules." Azure calls it "Network Security Groups." They're all firewalls. They all do the same thing. They all have completely different APIs.

Our job is to build the universal translator. Standardized blocks that compile down to provider-specific infrastructure. Write once, deploy anywhere.

(If that sounds simple, I invite you to read the AWS VPC documentation and the Google Cloud VPC documentation back-to-back. Then call your therapist.)

Timeline: Q3-Q4 2026

Step 4: Full Multi-Cloud ICE Light

Status: The dream I whisper to myself at night

This is the big one. The feature that makes CTOs weep with joy. The end of vendor lock-in.

Full multi-cloud means:

• Deploy the same application across multiple providers simultaneously
• Failover between clouds automatically
• Move your entire infrastructure from AWS to Google Cloud with one click
• Run different services on different providers (database on AWS, compute on Google, CDN on Cloudflare)

New templates for serious infrastructure:

• Video Streaming Platform - Encoding pipeline, CDN distribution, adaptive bitrate streaming, storage. Build your own Netflix. Okay, maybe your own Vimeo. The point is: video infrastructure is notoriously painful, and we're packaging it into something a solo developer can deploy.

• Private AI Platform - This is the big one. Deploy your own LLM infrastructure. On your hardware. In your cloud. Your data never leaves your environment. Fine-tuning pipelines, inference endpoints, model versioning, GPU orchestration. For companies that want AI capabilities without sending sensitive data to OpenAI or Anthropic. (No offense, Claude. You're great. But some industries can't use you for compliance reasons.)

Why multi-cloud matters for these templates: Video streaming needs edge nodes everywhere. AI inference needs GPUs wherever they're cheapest (spoiler: it's not always AWS). Multi-cloud lets you optimize for performance AND cost simultaneously.

Real scenario this solves: Your startup is on AWS. AWS has an outage. (They had a major one in October 2025-I wrote about it.) Your entire product goes down. Your customers are angry. Your competitors are tweeting "maybe try [their product]."

With full multi-cloud ICE Light, you click a button and your traffic shifts to Google Cloud. Outage? What outage? Your users don't even notice.

Another scenario: AWS jacks up their prices. Again. You get the email. You sigh. You open a spreadsheet to calculate the damage.

With ICE Light, you click "migrate to cheaper provider," go get coffee, and come back to a deployment that costs 40% less. Same infrastructure. Different bill.

The engineering reality: This is genuinely hard. Not "startup hard" where you just need more engineers. Academically hard. State synchronization across providers. Data consistency during migration. DNS propagation. SSL certificate management across multiple endpoints.

We're building it anyway. Because someone has to.

Timeline: 2027 (I'm not lying to you about this one)

Step 5: ICE Pro - The Enterprise Beast Awakens

Status: Napkin sketches and big dreams

ICE Light is for startups, indie hackers, and developers who want things to just work.

ICE Pro is for companies that need to know exactly what's happening across their entire cloud infrastructure. Real-time. In depth. With alerts that actually mean something.

ICE Pro features (planned):

• Deep infrastructure monitoring (not just "is it up," but "why is it slow")
• Cost anomaly detection with AI (spot the runaway Lambda before it costs you $4,000)
• Security posture management (find misconfigurations before hackers do)
• Compliance dashboards (SOC 2, HIPAA, GDPR-one view)
• Team management and access controls
• Audit logs for everything
• Custom alerting rules that don't spam you at 3 AM for nothing

Who this is for: Growing startups hitting scale. SMBs with actual infrastructure. Companies that got burned by surprise bills (hi, it me) and never want it to happen again.

The philosophy shift: ICE Light says "don't worry about infrastructure, we handle it." ICE Pro says "here's exactly what your infrastructure is doing, in terms a human can understand."

Both are valid. Different stages need different tools.

Timeline: 2027-2028 (enterprise features take enterprise time)

The Honest Timeline Disclaimer

Look, I've been in this industry for over a decade. I've seen roadmaps. I've written roadmaps. I've watched roadmaps catch fire and burn to the ground while everyone pretends everything is fine.

Here's what I know:

• Step 1 is done
• Step 2 is happening right now
• Steps 3-5 will happen in that order
• The exact dates will shift because software development is not a factory assembly line

What won't shift: our commitment to building something that actually works. That respects developers' time. That doesn't hide costs in 73-page invoices.

If you want a roadmap with exact dates and contractual guarantees, go buy from Oracle. (Actually, don't. Have you seen their contracts?)

If you want to watch a small team build something genuinely useful in real-time, with all the chaos and pivots and "we changed this because users told us it sucked"-stick with us.

Why I'm Telling You All This

Most startups hide their roadmaps. Competitive advantage. Trade secrets. Fear that someone will build it faster.

I'm showing you ours because:

1. Accountability. Now I have to actually build this stuff. You're all witnesses.

2. Feedback. If you look at this roadmap and think "you're missing X"-tell me. Seriously. Our beta users have already shaped half of what we're building.

3. Trust. The cloud industry runs on opacity. Hidden pricing. Vague "enterprise features." Roadmaps that say "coming soon" for three years. We're trying something different.

Want to Be Part of This?

We're actively building, actively fundraising, and actively looking for beta users who want to shape what cloud infrastructure becomes.

For developers: Join the beta. Break things. Tell us what sucks. Get free access while we're in this phase.

For investors: We're raising pre-seed. If you've ever been personally victimized by a cloud bill, we should talk.

For the curious: Follow along. Sign up for the waitlist. Watch us either succeed spectacularly or fail publicly.

Either way, it'll be entertaining :D