Accelerating software development was a top priority for Joe Beda and Craig McLuckie, two of the founders of the Kubernetes project at Google, which is why they started their own company announced this week: Heptio.
Heptio raised US$8.5 million in a series A investment round led by Accel, with participation from Madrona Venture Group. With this funding, Heptio said it can help companies transition to the cloud in order to speed up infrastructure releases and increase agility. Heptio also aims to help enterprises with the complexity of managing software at scale, and to support and advance the open Kubernetes ecosystem.
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“While the technology [of Kubernetes] is incredibly powerful, we have seen developers struggle to get up and running quickly,” said McLuckie, CEO of Heptio. “Heptio’s early focus is on making Kubernetes more accessible to developers running apps on-premises or in the public cloud. In the future we plan to work closely with the open ecosystem to advance the platform, and deliver the features enterprises need to run Kubernetes at scale.”
Heptio aims to bridge the gap between enterprise IT and cloud native computing, and since it was built from the ground up, it’s good enough for modern enterprises. It also “smooths the road to production use of Docker containers,” according to the company.
Heptio also allows teams to move from on-premise to the cloud and between public clouds. It also allows them to update their operating systems with little impact to applications. Developers will be able to focus on their code with API-driven operations, allowing developers to focus on code, not business plans.
Members of the open-source community are looking forward to future developments of Heptio, like Jim Zemlin, executive director of the Linux Foundation. He said that entrepreneurs like Beda and McLuckie were key players in the formation of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation, and he said they appreciate their commitment to both the open-source and open community initiatives, he said on Heptio’s blog.
In the coming months, Beda and McLuckie plan on sharing what they are up to with the project, keeping it as open as the Kubernetes project. Developers and engineers who are interested in the project’s future progress can get updates here.
Kubernetes is an open-source system for automating deployment, and scaling and managing containerized applications. Beda, McLuckie and other Seattle engineers created it in 2014.
