Today Slim.ai launched with its cloud-based DevOps automation platform built specifically for software developers. It provides new capabilities and streamlined workflows that help developers accelerate and automate the production, operation and management of containerized applications.
“Developers shouldn’t need to be experts at the details of container internals, build systems, deployments and infrastructure to deliver and run their cloud-native applications,” said John Amaral, co-founder and CEO of Slim.ai. “With Slim.ai, developers can gain control over containerized application size, performance, cost, security and deployment times without specialized knowledge. They can focus on writing great code, maintain high velocity and easily build, run and own their apps with low overhead and effort.”
Slim.ai founders John Amaral, CEO, and Kyle Quest, CTO, experienced first-hand how software developer productivity was declining and saw developers increasingly face challenges to deliver production-grade containerized applications. They conceived Slim.ai to address these challenges by replacing the myriad ad-hoc, proprietary and manual processes and systems that are typically used today by developers and DevOps teams to deliver containerized applications to production.
The key to Slim.ai’s automation is its novel “application intelligence.” Slim.ai’s platform analyzes and understands application composition and behavior by observing and interpreting how containers (and sets of containers) are constructed and run. Application intelligence works by employing a combination of run-time and static container analysis and specialized container build and optimization engines.
The platform offers rich visualizations and analysis that give developers deep insight into containerized applications. It also offers integrated workflows that can automate common container-related tasks such as selecting and building container images, managing container size, removing vulnerabilities and generating security profiles. The platform integrates with CI/CD pipelines, container registries and code repos to access Docker containers and related source-code files as inputs.
The Slim.ai Platform and DockerSlim’s New Visibility Features
The new Slim.ai platform augments and expands the capabilities of the popular open source DockerSlim product. DockerSlim automatically analyzes and optimizes containerized applications greatly reducing the level of effort required by engineers to make containers smaller, secure and production ready. DockerSlim is currently used by thousands of developers at well-known global enterprises and has more than 9500 GitHub stars.
DockerSlim has new visibility features specifically targeted at analyzing and visualizing container internals, layers and the software that makes up a container. Developers can use these capabilities to rapidly understand, evaluate and improve containers much more quickly and efficiently than currently possible with typical tools and workflows.
Kyle Quest, co-founder and CTO of Slim.ai and creator of DockerSlim, said: “DockerSlim users have been asking for new ways to understand and evaluate containers. They want one tool that offers comprehensive visibility into container composition rather than using manual inspection or a collection of other open source and ad-hoc tools. The new visibility features in DockerSlim provide a comprehensive solution for developers to address these challenges. We are also working on powerful visualizations and analytics in our cloud platform that make the utility of our visibility features even greater.”
Slim.ai Raises $6.6 Million in Seed Funding
As part of today’s announcement, Slim.ai announced that it has raised $6.6 million in seed funding from Boldstart Ventures, Decibel Partners, FXP Ventures and TechAviv Founder Partners. Slim.ai will use this funding to expand DockerSlim’s feature set, support its growing open source developer community and deliver on its core platform.
Ed Sim, Founder and General Partner at Boldstart Ventures, said: “Developer productivity is one of our core focus areas at Boldstart Ventures, and there is no better place to improve efficiency than at the container level which has seen little innovation. In addition, as cloud-native applications have proliferated, massive inefficiencies and complexity have arisen in container size, performance and sprawl. We’re thrilled to partner with Slim.ai. They have created a new layer of application-centric container intelligence and optimized build engine resulting in dramatic improvements in discovery, visibility, speed, agility and security. Thousands of developers at global enterprises love using Slim in production, and we look forward to many hundreds of thousands more using Slim.ai to efficiently create, build and run their cloud-native applications.”
Jon Sakoda, Founding Partner of Decibel Partners, said: “Software has been eating the world, and containers now shoulder the weight of developers moving all of their applications to the cloud. More than 10 million unique container registries are pulled several billion times a month to keep our digital world moving every day, and oversized containers are now limiting our ability to drive innovation and new feature development in existing products. Every software team wants to rapidly develop new features without slowing down their infrastructure, reducing engineering productivity or introducing new security vulnerabilities. Slim.ai creates safe, fast and flexible containers without cost or complexity for developers. We are excited to invest in Slim.ai to support our fast-growing community of users and to offer more deployment options for software teams large and small.”
Gil Zimmermann, Founding Partner of FXP Ventures, said: “John and Kyle’s dedication to improving the lives of developers has resonated with a fast-growing community of like-minded developers, working together to simplify the creation, building and deployment of containerized applications. The Slim.ai team has proven that, when developers have the productivity tools they need, it becomes much easier for them to build more efficient, performant and secure applications with high velocity. We are thrilled to partner with John and Kyle and change how developers compose applications forever.”
