Never before have there been so many companies solely devoted to building developer services. If you need it, it's probably being offered as a service by a startup. Everything from log management, to heat maps, social api management, message queue, they're all cloud services now. You'd be surprised at just how many different types of services there are out there (we certainly were). Some call them B2D (Business to Developer), because many of these services are developer-facing. There's a ton of them and these services are helping developers and their businesses be more successful everyday.

Why you should care

It doesn't make sense to spend a ton of time building a transactional email service in-house when companies like and , live, sleep, eat, and breathe email delivery; they're the experts. Over time, the cost to use their service is much lower than the cost to develop and maintain it internally. These companies are the best at what they do, so by allowing them to perform that particular service for your company, you're optimizing your time and money. You likely can't put an entire team behind that one service to continually improve it. The reality is, if you're not using the best services, your chances of success are lower because you're competing with companies that using the best services. Companies that stay laser-focused on their "one thing" can be  . But how do you find these magical services? TechCrunch? HackerNews? Twitter?