open source
Auto Added by WPeMatico
Solo.io announces service mesh platform aimed at enterprise customers
Solo.io, a Cambridge, Massachusetts service mesh startup, announced some big changes to its approach today with a full-stack platform of services aimed squarely at the enterprise. The culmination of this will be Gloo Mesh Enterprise, a new product that will be available in beta by the end of the year.
Service meshes are part of a cloud native, containerized approach to development that enable micro services to communicate with one another.
Idit Levine, founder and CEO at Solo, says that she began by creating individual components since launching the company in 2017 because she knew that it was early for service meshes. Today’s announcement is about bringing all of these components the company has created into a more coherent and connected enterprise product.
While she was worried at first that the pandemic would have a negative impact on business, she says that her company has been busier than ever and today’s announcement is really about giving customers what they have been asking for throughout this tumultuous year.
Most of Solo’s customers are running Kubernetes and they needed some missing pieces that Solo was happy to provide for them. The first problem is the primary reason the company started, which was to manage service meshes, and Gloo Mesh, which is based on the open-source Istio service mesh, helps developers manage their service mesh clusters.
Another problem involved running containers at the edge, which required an API gateway. To that end, the company announced Gloo Edge, an API gateway built on the Envoy Proxy, an edge service proxy. Running applications at the edge means they get the resources they need to improve performance and save bandwidth.
The third piece is called Gloo Portal. This provides a centralized, self-service catalog of services that developers can tap into as they are building their applications. The final piece is Gloo Extensions, which provides a way for developers to access or build extensions called web assembly modules.
All of these pieces are available as open source, but companies that want additional functionality and support and a way to connect all of these pieces will need to buy the enterprise product. Among the additional features in the enterprise version is the ability to apply roles to the APIs in Gloo Edge to control who has access. Gloo Mesh users get production Istio support including updates and patches. It also includes a dashboard for managing clusters and developer tools for building web assembly pieces in Gloo Extension.
The company has raised more than $36 million, according to PitchBook data. The most recent deal was $23 million in September. Levine says the startup has several dozen large customers at this point, and 35 employees. She said she is actively hiring and expects to be at 50 soon.
Powered by WPeMatico
Tim Berners Lee’s startup Inrupt releases Solid privacy platform for enterprises
Inrupt, the startup from World Wide Web founder Tim Berners-Lee, announced an enterprise version of the Solid privacy platform today, which allows large organizations and governments to build applications that put users in control of their data.
Berners-Lee has always believed that the web should be free and open, but large organizations have grown up over the last 20 years that make their money using our data. He wanted to put people back in charge of their data, and the Solid open source project, developed at MIT, was the first step in that process.
Three years ago he launched Inrupt, a startup built on top of the open source project, and hired John Bruce to run the company. The two shared the same vision of shifting data ownership without changing the way websites get developed. With Solid, developers use the same standards and methods of building sites, and these applications will work in any browser. What Solid aims to do is alter the balance of data power and redirect it to the user.
“Fast forward to today, and we’re releasing the first significant technology as the fruits of our labor, which is an enterprise version of Solid to be deployed at scale by large organizations,” Bruce explained.
The core idea behind this approach is that users control their data in online storage entities called Personal Online Data Stores or Pods for short. The enterprise version consists of Solid Server to manage the Pods, and developers can build applications using an SDK to take advantage of the Pods and access the data they need to do a particular job like pay taxes or interact with a healthcare provider. Bruce points out that the enterprise version is fully compatible with the open source Solid project specifications.
The company has been working with some major organizations prior to today’s release including the BBC and National Health Service in the UK and the Government of Flanders in Belgium as they have been working to bring this to market.
To give you a sense of how this works, the National Health Service has been building an application for patients interacting with them, who using Solid can control their health data. “Patients will be able to permit doctors, family or at-home caregivers to read certain data from their Solid Pods, and add caretaking notes or observations that doctors can then read in order to improve patient care,” the company explained.
The difference between this and more conventional web or phone apps is that it is up to the user who can access this information and the application owner has to ask the user for permission and the user has to explicitly grant it and under what conditions.
The startup launched in 2017 and has raised about $20 million so far. Bruce and Berners-Lee understand that for this to take root, it has to be easy to use, be standards-based and and have the capacity to handle massive scale. Anyone can download and use the open source version of Solid, but by having an enterprise version, it gives large organizations like the ones they have been working with the support, security and scale that these companies require.
Powered by WPeMatico
Armory nabs $40M Series C as commercial biz on top of open-source Spinnaker project takes off
As companies continue to shift more quickly to the cloud, pushed by the pandemic, startups like Armory that work in the cloud-native space are seeing an uptick in interest. Armory is a company built to be a commercial layer on top of the open-source continuous delivery project Spinnaker. Today, it announced a $40 million Series C.
B Capital led the round, with help from new investors Lead Edge Capital and Marc Benioff along with previous investors Insight Partners, Crosslink Capital, Bain Capital Ventures, Mango Capital, Y Combinator and Javelin Venture Partners. Today’s investment brings the total raised to more than $82 million.
“Spinnaker is an open-source project that came out of Netflix and Google, and it is a very sophisticated multi-cloud and software delivery platform,” company co-founder and CEO Daniel R. Odio told TechCrunch.
Odio points out that this project has the backing of industry leaders, including the three leading public cloud infrastructure vendors Amazon, Microsoft and Google, as well as other cloud players like CloudFoundry and HashiCorp. “The fact that there is a lot of open-source community support for this project means that it is becoming the new standard for cloud-native software delivery,” he said.
In the days before the notion of continuous delivery, companies moved forward slowly, releasing large updates over months or years. As software moved to the cloud, this approach no longer made sense and companies began delivering updates more incrementally, adding features when they were ready. Adding a continuous delivery layer helped facilitate this move.
As Odio describes it, Armory extends the Spinnaker project to help implement complex use cases at large organizations, including around compliance and governance and security. It is also in the early stages of implementing a SaaS version of the solution, which should be available next year.
While he didn’t want to discuss customer numbers, he mentioned JPMorgan Chase and Autodesk as customers, along with less specific allusions to “a Fortune Five technology company, a Fortune 20 Bank, a Fortune 50 retailer and a Fortune 100 technology company.”
The company currently has 75 employees, but Odio says business has been booming and he plans to double the team in the next year. As he does, he says that he is deeply committed to diversity and inclusion.
“There’s actually a really big difference between diversity and inclusion, and there’s a great Vernā Myers quote that diversity is being asked to the party and inclusion is being asked to dance, and so it’s actually important for us not only to focus on diversity, but also focus on inclusion because that’s how we win. By having a heterogeneous company, we will outperform a homogeneous company,” he said.
While the company has moved to remote work during COVID, Odio says they intend to remain that way, even after the current crisis is over. “Now obviously COVID been a real challenge for the world, including us. We’ve gone to a fully remote-first model, and we are going to stay remote-first even after COVID. And it’s really important for us to be taking care of our people, so there’s a lot of human empathy here,” he said.
But at the same time, he sees COVID opening up businesses to move to the cloud and that represents an opportunity for his business, one that he will focus on with new capital at his disposal. “In terms of the business opportunity, we exist to help power the transformation that these enterprises are undergoing right now, and there’s a lot of urgency for us to execute on our vision and mission because there is a lot of demand for this right now,” he said.
Powered by WPeMatico
Altinity grabs $4M seed to build cloud version of ClickHouse open-source data warehouse
Earlier this month, cloud data warehouse Snowflake turned heads when it debuted on the stock market. Today, Altinity, the commercial company behind the open-source ClickHouse data warehouse, announced a $4 million seed round from Accel along with a new cloud service, Altinity.Cloud.
“Fundamentally, the company started out as an open-source services bureau offering support, training and [custom] engineering features into ClickHouse. And what we’re doing now with this investment from Accel is we’re extending it to offer a cloud platform in addition to the other things that we already have,” CEO Robert Hodges told TechCrunch.
As the company describes it, “Altinity.Cloud offers immediate access to production-ready ClickHouse clusters with expert enterprise support during every aspect of the application life cycle.” It also helps with application design and implementation and production assistance, in essence combining the consulting side of the house with the cloud service.
The company was launched in 2017 by CTO Alexander Zaitsev, who was one of the early adopters of ClickHouse. Up until now the startup has been bootstrapped with revenue from the services business.
Hodges came on board last year after a stint at VMware because he saw a company with tremendous potential, and his background in cloud services made him a good person to lead the company as it built the cloud product and moved into its next phase.
ClickHouse at its core is a relational database that can run in the cloud or on-prem with big improvements in performance, Hodges says. And he says that developers are enamored with it because you can start a project on a laptop and scale it up from there.
“We’re very simple to operate, just a single binary. You can start from a Docker image. You can run it anywhere, literally anywhere that Linux runs, from an Intel Nuc all the way up to clusters with hundreds of nodes,” Hodges explained.
The investment from Accel should help them finish building the cloud product, which has been in private beta since July, while helping them build a sales and marketing operation to help sell it to the target enterprise market. The startup currently has 27 people, with plans to hire 15 more.
Hodges says that he wants to build a diverse and inclusive company, something he says the tech industry in general has failed at achieving. He believes that one of the reasons for that is the requirement of a computer science degree, which he says has created “a gate for women and people of color,” and he thinks by hiring people with more diverse backgrounds, you can build a more diverse company.
“So one of the things that’s high up on my list is to get back to a more equitable and diverse population of people working on this thing,” he said.
Over time, the company sees the cloud business overtaking the consulting arm in terms of revenue, but that aspect of the business will always have a role in the revenue mix because this is complex by its nature, even with a cloud service.
“Customers can’t just do it entirely by having a push-button interface. They will actually need humans that work with them, and help them understand how to frame problems, help them understand how to build applications that take care of that […] And then finally, help them deal with problems that naturally arise when you’re when you’re in production,” he said.
Powered by WPeMatico
Five years after creating Traefik application proxy, open-source project hits 2B downloads
Five years ago, Traefik Labs founder and CEO Emile Vauge was working on a project deploying thousands of microservices and he was lacking a cloud-native application proxy that could handle this kind of scale. So like any good developer, he created one himself, and Traefik was born.
If you go back five years, the notion of cloud native was still in its infancy. Docker has been doing containers for just a couple of years, and Kubernetes would only be released that year. There wasn’t much cloud-native tooling around, so Vauge decided to build a cloud-native reverse proxy out of pure necessity.
“At that time, five years ago, there was no reverse proxy that was good at managing the complexity of microservices at cloud scale. So that was really the origin of Traefik. And one of the big innovations was its automation and its simplicity,” he said.
As he explained it, a reverse proxy needs to have several features, like traffic management, load balancing, observability and security, but much of this had to be done manually with the tools available at the time. As it turns out, Vauge had stumbled onto a major pain point.
“Initially I created Traefik for myself. It was a side project but it turned out that there was a huge interest and very quickly a community gathered around the project,” he said. After a few months, he realized he could build a company around this and left his job to start a company called Containous.
Today, he changed the name of that company to Traefik Labs and the open-source project he developed has become wildly popular. “Five years later we are at 2 billion downloads. It’s in the top 10 most downloaded projects on Docker. We have 30,000 stars on GitHub. So basically it’s one of the largest open-source projects in the world,” he said. In addition, he said there are more than 550 individuals contributing to the project today.
When he formed Containous, he developed an open core-based commercial project designed for enterprise needs around scaling, high availability and more security features. Today, that includes the Traefik Proxy and an open-source service mesh called Traefik Mesh.
Among the companies using the open-source project today are Conde Nast, eBay Classifieds and Mailchimp.
Vauge certainly was in the right place at the right time five years ago, which he modestly attributes to luck because he was working at one of the few companies at the time that was dealing with microservices at scale. “We had to build a lot of things, and Traefik was one of those things. So I was basically lucky because I created Traefik at the right time,” he said.
Not surprisingly, a company with that kind of open-source traction has attracted the interest of venture capitalists, and Vauge has raised $16 million since he launched his company in 2015, including $10 million led by Balderton Capital in January.
Powered by WPeMatico
Progress snags software automation platform Chef for $220M
Progress, a Boston-area developer tool company, boosted its offerings in a big way today when it announced it was acquiring software automation platform Chef for $220 million.
Chef, which went 100% open source last year, had annual recurring revenue (ARR) of $70 million from the commercial side of the house. Needless to say, Progress CEO Yogesh Gupta was happy to bring the company into the fold and gain not only that revenue, but a set of highly skilled employees, a strong developer community and an impressive customer list.
Gupta said that Chef fits with his company’s acquisition philosophy. “This acquisition perfectly aligns with our growth strategy and meets the requirements that we’ve previously laid out: a strong recurring revenue model, technology that complements our business, a loyal customer base and the ability to leverage our operating model and infrastructure to run the business more efficiently,” he said in a statement.
Chef CEO Barry Crist offered a typical argument for an acquired company; that Progress offered a better path to future growth, while sending a message to the open-source community and customers that Progress would be a good steward of the startup’s vision.
“For Chef, this acquisition is our next chapter, and Progress will help enhance our growth potential, support our Open Source vision, and provide broader opportunities for our customers, partners, employees and community,” Crist said in a statement.
Chef’s customer list is certainly impressive, and includes tech industry stalwarts like Facebook, IBM and SAP, as well as non-tech companies like Nordstrom, Alaska Airlines and Capital One.
The company was founded in 2008 and had raised $105 million, according to Crunchbase data. It hadn’t raised any funds since 2015, when it raised a $40 million Series E led by DFJ Growth. Other investors along the way included Battery Ventures, Ignition Partners and Scale Venture Partners.
The transaction is expected to close next month, pending normal regulatory approvals.
Powered by WPeMatico
MIT CSAIL grad launches machine learning platform with $10M Series A
Manasi Vartak, founder and CEO of Verta, conceived of the idea of the open-source project ModelDB database as a way to track versions of machine models while she was still in grad school at MIT. After she graduated, she decided to expand on that vision to build a product that could not only track model versions, but provide a way to operationalize them — and Verta was born.
Today, that company emerged from stealth with a $10 million Series A led by Intel Capital with participation from General Catalyst, which also led the company’s $1.7 million seed round.
Beyond providing a place to track model versioning, which ModelDB gave users, Vartak wanted to build a platform for data scientists to deploy those models into production, which has been difficult to do for many companies. She also wanted to make sure that once in production, they were still accurately reflecting the current data and not working with yesterday’s playbook.
“Verta can track if models are still valid and send out alarms when model performance changes unexpectedly,” the company explained.
Image Credits: Verta
Vartak says having that open-source project helped sell the company to investors early on, and acts as a way to attract possible customers now. “So for our seed round, it was definitely different because I was raising as a solo founder, a first-time founder right out of school, and that’s where having the open-source project was a huge win,” she said.
Certainly Mark Rostick, VP and senior managing director at lead investor Intel Capital, recognized that Verta was trying to solve a fundamental problem around machine learning model production. “Verta is addressing one of the key challenges companies face when adopting AI — bridging the gap between data scientists and developers to accelerate the deployment of machine learning models,” Rostick said.
While Vartak wasn’t ready to talk about how many customers she has just yet at this early stage of the company, she did say there were companies using the platform and getting models into production much faster.
Today, the company has 9 employees, and even at this early stage, she is taking diversity very seriously. In fact, her current employee makeup includes four Indian, three Caucasian, one Latino and one Asian, for a highly diverse mix. Her goal is to continue on this path as she builds the company. She is looking at getting to 15 employees this year, then doubling that by next year.
One thing Vartak also wants to do is have a 50/50 gender split, something she was able to achieve while at MIT in her various projects, and she wants to carry on with her company. She is also working with a third party, Sweat Equity Ventures, to help with recruiting diverse candidates.
She says that she likes to work iteratively to build the platform, while experimenting with new features, even with her small team. Right now, that involves interoperability with different machine learning tools out there like Amazon SageMaker or Kubeflow, the open-source machine learning pipeline tool.
“We realized that we need to meet customers where they are at their level of maturity. So we focused a lot the last couple of quarters on building a system that was interoperable so you can pick and choose the components kind of like Lego blocks and have a system that works end to end seamlessly.”
Powered by WPeMatico
Stacklet launches cloud governance platform with $4M seed investment
Stacklet co-founders Travis Stanfield and Kapil Thangavelu met while both were working at Capital One several years ago. Thangavelu helped create the Cloud Custodian open-source cloud governance project. The two eventually got together and decided to build a startup based on that project and today the company launched out of stealth with a $4 million seed investment from Foundation Capital and Addition.
Stanfield, who is CEO at the young startup, says that Cloud Custodian came about as Capital One was moving to a fully cloud approach in around 2013. As the company looked for ways to deal with compliance and governance, it found that organizations like theirs were forced to do one-off scripts and they were looking for a way that could be repeatable and scale.
“Cloud Custodian was developed as a way of understanding what all those one-off scripts were doing, looking at the cloud control plane, finding the interesting set of resources, and then taking sensitive actions on them,” he explained.
After leaving Capital One, and going off in different directions for a time, the two came together this year to start Stacklet as a way to nurture the underlying open-source project Thangavelu helped build, and build a commercial company to add some functionality to make it easier for enterprises to implement and understand.
While cloud administrators can download and figure out how to use the raw open source, Stacklet is attempting to make that easier by providing an administrative layer to manage usage across thousands of cloud accounts along with pre-packaged sets of common kinds of compliance requirements out of the box, analytics to understand how the tool is doing and what it’s finding in terms of issues, and finally a resources database to understand all of the cloud resources under management.
The company has just three employees, including the two founders, but will be adding a couple of more shortly with a goal of having a team of 10 by year’s end. The open-source project has 270 contributors from around the world. The startup is looking to build diversity through being fully remote. Not being limited by geography means they can hire from anywhere, and that can help lead to a more diverse group of employees.
The founders admit that it’s a tough time to start a company and to be fundraising, but on the bright side, they didn’t have to be on a plane to San Francisco every week during the process.
In fact, Sid Trivedi, partner at Foundation Capital, said that this was his first investment where he never met the founders in person, but he said through long discussions he learned “their passion for the opportunity at hand, experience of the market dynamics and vision for how they would solve the problem of meeting the needs of both IT/security admins and developers.”
Powered by WPeMatico
Microsoft launches Open Service Mesh
Microsoft today announced the launch of a new open-source service mesh based on the Envoy proxy. The Open Service Mesh is meant to be a reference implementation of the Service Mesh Interface (SMI) spec, a standard interface for service meshes on Kubernetes that has the backing of most of the players in this ecosystem.
The company plans to donate Open Service Mesh to the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) to ensure that it is community-led and has open governance.
“SMI is really resonating with folks and so we really thought that there was room in the ecosystem for a reference implementation of SMI where the mesh technology was first and foremost implementing those SMI APIs and making it the best possible SMI experience for customers,” Microsoft director of partner management for Azure Compute (and CNCF board member) Gabe Monroy told me.
Image Credits: Microsoft
He also added that, because SMI provides the lowest common denominator API design, Open Service Mesh gives users the ability to “bail out” to raw Envoy if they need some more advanced features. This “no cliffs” design, Monroy noted, is core to the philosophy behind Open Service Mesh.
As for its feature set, SMI handles all of the standard service mesh features you’d expect, including securing communications between services using mTLS, managing access control policies, service monitoring and more.
Image Credits: Microsoft
There are plenty of other service mesh technologies in the market today, though. So why would Microsoft launch this?
“What our customers have been telling us is that solutions that are out there today, Istio being a good example, are extremely complex,” he said. “It’s not just me saying this. We see the data in the AKS support queue of customers who are trying to use this stuff — and they’re struggling right here. This is just hard technology to use, hard technology to build at scale. And so the solutions that were out there all had something that wasn’t quite right and we really felt like something lighter weight and something with more of an SMI focus was what was going to hit the sweet spot for the customers that are dabbling in this technology today.”
Monroy also noted that Open Service Mesh can sit alongside other solutions like Linkerd, for example.
A lot of pundits expected Google to also donate its Istio service mesh to the CNCF. That move didn’t materialize. “It’s funny. A lot of people are very focused on the governance aspect of this,” he said. “I think when people over-focus on that, you lose sight of how are customers doing with this technology. And the truth is that customers are not having a great time with Istio in the wild today. I think even folks who are deep in that community will acknowledge that and that’s really the reason why we’re not interested in contributing to that ecosystem at the moment.”
Powered by WPeMatico
Kubermatic launches open-source service hub to enable complex service management
As Kubernetes and cloud-native technologies proliferate, developers and IT have found a growing set of technical challenges they need to address, and new concepts and projects have popped up to deal with them. For instance, operators provide a way to package, deploy and manage your cloud-native application in an automated way. Kubermatic wants to take that concept a step further, and today the German startup announced KubeCarrier, a new open-source, cloud-native service management hub.
Kubermatic co-founder Sebastian Scheele says three or four years ago, the cloud-native community needed to solve a bunch of technical problems around deploying Kubernetes clusters, such as overlay networking, service meshes and authentication. He sees a similar set of problems arising today where developers need more tools to manage the growing complexity of running Kubernetes clusters at scale.
Kubermatic has developed KubeCarrier to help solve one aspect of this. “What we’re currently focusing on is how to provision and manage workloads across multiple clusters, and how IT organizations can have a service hub where they can provide those services to their organizations in a centralized way,” Scheele explained.
Scheele says that KubeCarrier provides a way to manage and implement all of this, giving organizations much greater flexibility beyond purely managing Kubernetes. While he sees organizations with lots of Kubernetes operators, he says that as he sees it, it doesn’t stop there. “We have lots of Kubernetes operators now, but how do we manage them, especially when there are multiple operators, [along with] the services they are provisioning,” he asked.
This could involve provisioning something like Database as a Service inside the organization or for external customers, while combining or provisioning multiple services, which are working on multiple levels and a need a way to communicate with each other.
“That is where KubeCarrier comes in. Now, we can help our customers to build this kind of automation around provisioning, and service capability so that different teams can provide different services inside the organization or to external customers,” he said.
As the company explains it, “KubeCarrier addresses these complexities by harnessing the Kubernetes API and Operators into a central framework allowing enterprises and service providers to deliver cloud native service management from one multi-cloud, multi-cluster hub.”
KubeCarrier is available on GitHub, and Scheele says the company is hoping to get feedback from the community about how to improve it. In parallel, the company is looking for ways to incorporate this technology into its commercial offerings, and that should be available in the next 3-6 months, he said.
Powered by WPeMatico