This company Nominal (nominal.io) just raised $80M at a $1B+ valuation for hardware engineering data infrastructure. That alone is interesting. But what caught my eye is they released a physical product catalog styled after McMaster-Carr. Square-back binding, industrial aesthetic, the whole thing. It's a software company shipping a paper catalog in 2026.
Their product helps hardware teams (aerospace, defense, automotive) manage test and operational data. Think time series, video, structured metadata across massive test campaigns. Customers like Anduril and Hermeus are using it.
But honestly I'm just here for the catalog. Someone over there clearly cares about the craft of how engineering tools get presented to the world. The website has a similar retro-industrial vibe. Feels like a throwback to when instrument companies like Tektronix and HP actually had taste.
Northscaler | Sr. DevOps Engineer | REMOTE (based in Austin, TX) | Contractor (potentially contact to hire) | https://www.northscaler.com/
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Northscaler´s world leading scale-up technology provides sustainable solutions for businesses to grow operations. We like to think of scaling technology as the invisible business enabler – working progressively and intuitively with your teams so that you can be unbounded in your achievements.
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Our client base is largely small companies looking to either improve or replatform existing deployments. Each of our clients has different requirements, but we specialize in helm charts on kubernetes, in either GKE, EKS or on prem. We have a staff of highly skilled software engineers, and are needing to expand our devops team.
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Technologies: NodeJS, Kafka, Kubernetes, Helm.
Contact david.jannotta at northscaler.com for more information
If Google began to charge for their services, at least there would be a way out. If a single market telecom raised prices or change policies, there isn't any real recourse.
The updates take the entire instance down for 2-5 minutes each month. While you can't avoid them, they can be scheduled for particularly low traffic times. If you're trying to avoid downtime, its a giant PIA. Even with HA enabled, you still lose master, slave and read replicas. Not entirely sure what they define HA as, but a mandatory monthly downtime doesn't usually fit into mine.
[Update]
That said, from what I understand, they have a road map to maintaining read replicas and queued writes. Not sure what the date on it is though.
Their product helps hardware teams (aerospace, defense, automotive) manage test and operational data. Think time series, video, structured metadata across massive test campaigns. Customers like Anduril and Hermeus are using it. But honestly I'm just here for the catalog. Someone over there clearly cares about the craft of how engineering tools get presented to the world. The website has a similar retro-industrial vibe. Feels like a throwback to when instrument companies like Tektronix and HP actually had taste.