Mar
10
2021
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Aqua Security raises $135M at a $1B valuation for its cloud native security platform

Aqua Security, a Boston- and Tel Aviv-based security startup that focuses squarely on securing cloud-native services, today announced that it has raised a $135 million Series E funding round at a $1 billion valuation. The round was led by ION Crossover Partners. Existing investors M12 Ventures, Lightspeed Venture Partners, Insight Partners, TLV Partners, Greenspring Associates and Acrew Capital also participated. In total, Aqua Security has now raised $265 million since it was founded in 2015.

The company was one of the earliest to focus on securing container deployments. And while many of its competitors were acquired over the years, Aqua remains independent and is now likely on a path to an IPO. When it launched, the industry focus was still very much on Docker and Docker containers. To the detriment of Docker, that quickly shifted to Kubernetes, which is now the de facto standard. But enterprises are also now looking at serverless and other new technologies on top of this new stack.

“Enterprises that five years ago were experimenting with different types of technologies are now facing a completely different technology stack, a completely different ecosystem and a completely new set of security requirements,” Aqua CEO Dror Davidoff told me. And with these new security requirements came a plethora of startups, all focusing on specific parts of the stack.

Image Credits: Aqua Security

What set Aqua apart, Dror argues, is that it managed to 1) become the best solution for container security and 2) realized that to succeed in the long run, it had to become a platform that would secure the entire cloud-native environment. About two years ago, the company made this switch from a product to a platform, as Davidoff describes it.

“There was a spree of acquisitions by CheckPoint and Palo Alto [Networks] and Trend [Micro],” Davidoff said. “They all started to acquire pieces and tried to build a more complete offering. The big advantage for Aqua was that we had everything natively built on one platform. […] Five years later, everyone is talking about cloud-native security. No one says ‘container security’ or ‘serverless security’ anymore. And Aqua is practically the broadest cloud-native security [platform].”

One interesting aspect of Aqua’s strategy is that it continues to bet on open source, too. Trivy, its open-source vulnerability scanner, is the default scanner for GitLab’s Harbor Registry and the CNCF’s Artifact Hub, for example.

“We are probably the best security open-source player there is because not only do we secure from vulnerable open source, we are also very active in the open-source community,” Davidoff said (with maybe a bit of hyperbole). “We provide tools to the community that are open source. To keep evolving, we have a whole open-source team. It’s part of the philosophy here that we want to be part of the community and it really helps us to understand it better and provide the right tools.”

In 2020, Aqua, which mostly focuses on mid-size and larger companies, doubled the number of paying customers and it now has more than half a dozen customers with an ARR of over $1 million each.

Davidoff tells me the company wasn’t actively looking for new funding. Its last funding round came together only a year ago, after all. But the team decided that it wanted to be able to double down on its current strategy and raise sooner than originally planned. ION had been interested in working with Aqua for a while, Davidoff told me, and while the company received other offers, the team decided to go ahead with ION as the lead investor (with all of Aqua’s existing investors also participating in this round).

“We want to grow from a product perspective, we want to grow from a go-to-market [perspective] and expand our geographical coverage — and we also want to be a little more acquisitive. That’s another direction we’re looking at because now we have the platform that allows us to do that. […] I feel we can take the company to great heights. That’s the plan. The market opportunity allows us to dream big.”

 

Aug
03
2015
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Checkpoint strikes back

In my recent benchmarks for MongoDB, we can see that the two engines WiredTiger and TokuMX struggle from periodical drops in throughput, which is clearly related to a checkpoint interval – and therefore I correspond it to a checkpoint activity.

The funny thing is that I thought we solved checkpointing issues in InnoDB once and for good. There are bunch of posts on this issue in InnoDB, dated some 4 years ago.  We did a lot of research back then working on a fix for Percona Server

But, like Baron said, “History Repeats“… and it seems it also repeats in technical issues.

So, let’s take a look what is checkpointing is, and why it is a problem for storage engines.

As you may know, a transactional engine writes transactional logs (name you may see: “redo logs”, write-ahead logs or WAL etc),
to be able to perform a crash recovery in the case of database crash or server power outage. To maintain somehow the time for recovery (we all expect that database will start quick), the engine has to limit how many changes are in logs. For this a transactional engine performs a “checkpoint,” which basically synchronizes changes in memory with corresponding changes in logs – so old log records can be deleted. Often it results in writing changed database pages from memory to a permanent storage.

InnoDB takes an approach to limit size of log files (in total it equals to innodb-log-file-size * innodb-log-files-in-group), which I name “size limited checkpointing”.
Both TokuDB and WiredTiger limit changes by time periods (by default 60 sec), which results in that log files may grow unlimited within a given time interval (I name it “time limited checkpointing”).

Also the difference is InnoDB takes a “fuzzy checkpointing” approach, which was not really “fuzzy”, until we fixed it, but basically it is not to wait until we reach size limited, but perform “checkpointing” all the time, and the more intensive the closer we get to log size limit. This allows to achieve more or less a smooth throughput, without significant drops in throughput.

Unlike InnoDB, both TokuDB (that I am sure) and WiredTiger (I speculate here, I did not look into WiredTiger internal) wait till the last moment, and perform checkpoint strictly by prescribed interval. If it happens that a database contains many changes in memory, it will result in performance stalls. This effect is close by effect to “hitting a wall on full speed”: user queries get locked, until an engine writes all changes in memory it has to write.

Interestingly enough, RocksDB, because it has a different architecture (I may write on it in future, but for now I will point to RocksDB Wiki), does not have this problem with checkpoints (it however has its own background activity, like level compactions and tombstone maintenance, but it is a different topic).

I do not know how WiredTiger is going to approach this issue with checkpoint, but we are looking to improve TokuDB to make this less painful for user queries – and eventually to move to “fuzzy checkpointing” model.

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