Personal blog of Yzmir Ramirez

Chronosphere, a startup from two ex-Uber engineers who helped create the open-source M3 monitoring project to handle Uber-level scale, officially launched today with the goal of building a commercial company on top of the open-source project.

It also announced an $11 million investment led by Greylock, with participation from venture capitalist Lee Fixel.

While the founders, CEO Martin Mao and CTO Rob Skillington, were working at Uber, they recognized a gap in the monitoring industry, particularly around cloud-native technologies like containers and microservices. There weren’t any tools available on the market that could handle Uber’s scaling requirements — so like any good engineers, they went out and built their own.

“We looked around at the market at the time and couldn’t find anything in open source or commercially available that could really scale to our needs. So we ended up building and open sourcing our solution, which is M3. Over the last three to four years we’ve scaled M3 to one of the largest production monitoring systems in the world today,” Mao explained.

The essential difference between M3 and other open-source, cloud-native monitoring solutions like Prometheus is that ability to scale, he says.

One of the main reasons they left to start a company, with the blessing of Uber, was that the community began asking for features that didn’t really make sense for Uber. By launching Chronosphere, Mao and Skillington would be taking on the management of the project moving forward (although sharing governance for the time being with Uber), while building those enterprise features the community has been requesting.

The new company’s first product will be a cloud version of M3 to help reduce some of the complexity associated with managing an M3 project. “M3 itself is a fairly complex piece of technology to run. It is solving a fairly complex problem at large scale, and running it actually requires a decent amount of investment to run at large scale, so the first thing we’re doing is taking care of that management,” Mao said.

Jerry Chen, who led the investment at Greylock, saw a company solving a big problem. “They were providing such a high-resolution view of what’s going on in your cloud infrastructure and doing that at scale at a cost that actually makes sense. They solved that problem at Uber, and I saw them, and I was like wow, the rest of the market needs what guys built and I wrote the Series A check. It was as simple as that,” Chen told TechCrunch.

The cloud product is currently in private beta; they expect to open to public beta early next year.

Volterra is an early-stage startup that has been quietly working on a comprehensive solution to help companies manage applications in hybrid environments. The company emerged from stealth today with a $50 million investment and a set of products.

Investors include Khosla Ventures and Mayfield, along with strategic investors M12 (Microsoft’s venture arm), Itochu Technology Ventures and Samsung NEXT. The company, which was founded in 2017, already has 100 employees and more than 30 customers.

What attracted these investors and customers is a full-stack solution that includes both hardware and software to manage applications in the cloud or on-prem. Volterra founder and CEO Ankur Singla says when he was at his previous company, Contrail Systems, which was acquired by Juniper Networks in 2012 for $176 million, he saw first-hand how large companies were struggling with the transition to hybrid.

“The big problem we saw was in building and operating applications that scale is a really hard problem. They were adopting multiple hybrid cloud strategies, and none of them solved the problem of unifying the application and the infrastructure layer, so that the application developers and DevOps teams don’t have to worry about that,” Singla explained.

He says the Volterra solution includes three main products — VoltStack?, VoltMesh and VoltConsole — to help solve this scaling and management problem. As Volterra describes the total solution, “Volterra has innovated a consistent, cloud-native environment that can be deployed across multiple public clouds and edge sites — a distributed cloud platform. Within this SaaS-based offering, Volterra integrates a broad range of services that have normally been siloed across many point products and network or cloud providers.” This includes not only the single management plane, but security, management and operations components.

Diagram: Volterra

The money has come over a couple of rounds, helping to build the solution to this point, and it required a complex combination of hardware and software to do it. They are hoping organizations that have been looking for a cloud-native approach to large-scale applications, such as industrial automation, will adopt this approach.

Datameer, the company that was born as a data prep startup on top of the open-source Hadoop project, announced a $40 million investment and a big pivot away from Hadoop, while staying true to its big data roots.

The investment was led by existing investor ST Telemedia . Existing investors Redpoint Ventures, Kleiner Perkins, Nextworld Capital, Citi Ventures and Top Tier Capital Partners also participated. Today’s investment brings the total raised to almost $140 million, according to Crunchbase data.

Company CEO Christian Rodatus says the company’s original mission was about making Hadoop easier to use for data scientists, business analysts and engineers. In the last year, the three biggest commercial Hadoop vendors — Cloudera, Hortonworks and MapR — fell on hard times. Cloudera and Hortonworks merged and MapR was sold to HPE in a fire sale.

Starting almost two years ago, Datameer recognized that against this backdrop, it was time for a change. It began developing a couple of new products. It didn’t want to abandon its existing customer base entirely, of course, so it began rebuilding its Hadoop product and is now calling it Datameer X. It is a modern cloud-native product built to run on Kubernetes, the popular open-source container orchestration tool. Instead of Hadoop, it will be based on Spark. He reports they are about two-thirds done with this pivot, but the product has been in the hands of customers.

The company also announced Neebo, an entirely new SaaS tool to give data scientists the ability to process data in whatever form it takes. Rodatus sees a world coming where data will take many forms, from traditional data to Python code from data analysts or data scientists to SaaS vendor dashboards. He sees Neebo bringing all of this together in a managed service with the hope that it will free data scientists to concentrate on getting insight from the data. It will work with data visualization tools like Tableau and Looker, and should be generally available in the coming weeks.

The money should help them get through this pivot, hire more engineers to continue the process and build a go-to-market team for the new products. It’s never easy pivoting like this, but the investors are likely hoping that the company can build on its existing customer base, while taking advantage of the market need for data science processing tools. Time will tell if it works.

Render, a participant in the TechCrunch Disrupt SF Startup Battlefield, has a big idea. It wants to take on the world’s biggest cloud vendors by offering developers a cheaper alternative that also removes a lot of the complexity around managing cloud infrastructure.

Render’s goal is to help developers, especially those in smaller companies, who don’t have large DevOps teams, to still take advantage of modern development approaches in the cloud. “We are focused on being the easiest and most flexible provider for teams to run any application in the cloud,” CEO and founder Anurag Goel explained.

He says that one of the biggest pain points for developers and startups, even fairly large startups, is that they have to build up a lot of DevOps expertise when they run applications in the cloud. “That means they are going to hire extremely expensive DevOps engineers or consultants to build out the infrastructure on AWS,” he said. Even after they set up the cloud infrastructure, and move applications there, he points out that there is ongoing maintenance around patching, security and identity access management. “Render abstracts all of that away, and automates all of it,” Goel said.

It’s not easy competing with the big players on scale, but he says so far they have been doing pretty well, and plan to move much of their operations to bare metal servers, which he believes will help stabilize costs further.

“Longer term, we have a lot of ideas [about how to reduce our costs], and the simplest thing we can do is to switch to bare metal to reduce our costs pretty much instantly.” He says the way they have built Render will make that easier to do. The plan now is to start moving their services to bare metal in the fourth quarter this year.

Even though the company only launched in April, it is already seeing great traction. “The response has been great. We’re now doing over 100 million HTTP requests every week. And we have thousands of developers and startups and everyone from people doing small hobby projects to even a major presidential campaign,” he said.

Although he couldn’t share the candidate’s name, he said they were using Render for everything including their infrastructure for hosting their web site and their back-end administration. “Basically all of their cloud infrastructure is on Render,” he said.

Render has raised a $2.2 million seed round and is continuing to add services to the product, including several new services it will announce this week around storage, infrastructure as code and one-click deployment.

At VMworld today in San Francisco, VMware introduced a new set of services for managing virtual machines and containers in a single view. Called Tanzu, the product takes advantage of the knowledge the company gained when it acquired Heptio last year.

As companies face an increasingly fragmented landscape of maintaining traditional virtual machines, alongside a more modern containerized Kubernetes environment, managing the two together has created its own set of management challenges for IT. This is further complicated by trying to manage resources across multiple clouds, as well as the in-house data centers. Finally, companies need to manage legacy applications, while looking to build newer containerized applications.

VMware’s Craig McLuckie and fellow Heptio co-founder Joe Beda were part of the original Kubernetes development team. They came to VMware via last year’s acquisition. McLuckie believes that Tanzu can help with all of this by applying the power of Kubernetes across this complex management landscape.

“The intent is to construct a portfolio that has a set of assets that cover every one of these areas, a robust set of capabilities that bring the Kubernetes substrate everywhere — a control plane that enables organizations to start to think about [and view] these highly fragmented deployments with Kubernetes [as the] common lens, and then the technologies you need to be able to bring existing applications forward and to build new application and to support third-party vendors bringing their applications into [this],” McLuckie explained.

It’s an ambitious vision that involves bringing together not only VMware’s traditional VM management tooling and Kubernetes, but also open-source pieces and other recent acquisitions, including Bitnami and Cloud Health along with Wavefront, which it acquired in 2017. Although the vision was defined long before the acquisition of Pivotal last week, it will also play a role in this. Originally that was as a partner, but now it will be as part of VMware.

The idea is to eventually cover the entire gamut of building, running and managing applications in the enterprise. Among the key pieces introduced today as technology previews are the Tanzu Mission Control, a tool for managing Kubernetes clusters wherever they live, and Project Pacific, which embeds Kubernetes natively into vSphere, the company’s virtualization platform, bringing together virtual machines and containers.

VMware Tanzu (Slide: VMware)

McLuckie sees bringing virtual machine and Kubernetes together in this fashion provides a couple of key advantages. “One is being able to bring a robust, modern API-driven way of thinking about accessing resources. And it turns out that there is this really good technology for that. It’s called Kubernetes. So being able to bring a Kubernetes control plane to vSphere is creating a new set of experiences for traditional VMware customers that is moving much closer to a kind of cloud-like agile infrastructure type of experience. At the same time, vSphere is bringing a whole bunch of capabilities to Kubernetes that’s creating more efficient isolation capabilities,” he said.

When you think about the cloud-native vision, it has always been about enabling companies to manage resources wherever they live through a single lens, and this is what this set of capabilities that VMware has brought together under Tanzu is intended to do. “Kubernetes is a way of bringing a control metaphor to modern IT processes. You provide an expression of what you want to have happen, and then Kubernetes takes that and interprets it and drives the world into that desired state,” McLuckie explained.

If VMware can take all of the pieces in the Tanzu vision and make this happen, it will be as powerful as McLuckie believes it to be. It’s certainly an interesting attempt to bring all of a company’s application and infrastructure creation and management under one roof using Kubernetes as the glue — and with Heptio co-founders McLuckie and Beda involved, it certainly has the expertise in place to drive the vision.

Mesosphere was born as the commercial face of the open-source Mesos project. It was surely a clever solution to make virtual machines run much more efficiently, but times change and companies change. Today the company announced it was changing its name to Day2IQ, or D2IQ for short, and fixing its sights on Kubernetes and cloud native, which have grown quickly in the years since Mesos appeared on the scene.

D2IQ CEO Mike Fey says that the name reflects the company’s new approach. Instead of focusing entirely on the Mesos project, it wants to concentrate on helping more mature organizations adopt cloud native technologies.

“We felt like the Mesosphere name was somewhat constrictive. It made statements about the company that really allocated us to a given technology, instead of to our core mission, which is supporting successful Day Two operations, making cloud native a viable approach not just for the early adopters, but for everybody,” Fey explained.

Fey is careful to point out that the company will continue to support the Mesos-driven DC/OS solution, but the general focus of the company has shifted, and the new name is meant to illustrate that. “The Mesos product line is still doing well, and there are things that it does that nothing else can deliver on yet. So we’re not abandoning that totally, but we do see that Kubernetes is very powerful, and the community behind it is amazing, and we want to be a value-added member of that community,” he said.

He adds that this is not about jumping on the cloud-native bandwagon all of a sudden. He points out his company has had a Kubernetes product for more than a year running on top of DC/OS, and it has been a contributing member to the cloud native community.

It’s not just about a name change and refocusing the company and the brand, it also involves several new cloud-native products that the company has built to serve the type of audience, the more mature organization, that the new name was inspired by.

For starters, it’s introducing its own flavor of Kubernetes called Konvoy, which, it says, provides an “enterprise-grade Kubernetes experience.” The company will also provide a support and training layer, which it believes is a key missing piece, and one that is required by larger organizations looking to move to cloud native.

In addition, it is offering a data integration layer, which is designed to help integrate large amounts of data in a cloud-native fashion. To that end, it is introducing a beta of Kudo, an open-source cloud-native tool for building stateful operations in Kubernetes. The company has already offered to donate this tool to the Cloud Native Computing foundation, the open-source organization that houses Kubernetes and other cloud-native projects.

The company faces stiff competition in this space from some heavy hitters, like the newly combined IBM and Red Hat, but it believes by adhering to a strong open-source ethos, it can move beyond its Mesos roots to become a player in the cloud-native space. Time will tell if it made a good bet.

Over the past five years, Kubernetes has grown from a project inside of Google to an open source powerhouse with an ecosystem of products and services, attracting billions of dollars in venture investment. In fact, we’ve already seen some successful exits, including one from one of our panelists.

On September 5th at TC Sessions: Enterprise, we’re going to be discussing the rise of Kubernetes with two industry veterans. For starters we have Aparna Sinha, director of product management for Kubernetes and the newly announced Anthos product. Sinha was in charge of several early Kubernetes releases and has worked on the Kubernetes team at Google since 2016. Prior to joining Google, she had 15 years experience in enterprise software settings.

Craig McLuckie will also be joining the conversation. He’s one of the original developers of Kubernetes at Google. He went on to found his own Kubernetes startup, Heptio, with Joe Beda, another Google Kubernetes alum. They sold the company to VMware last year for $505 million after raising $33.5 million, according to Crunchbase data.

The two bring a vast reservoir of knowledge and will be discussing the history of Kubernetes, why Google decided to open source it and how it came to grow so quickly. Two other Kubernetes luminaries will be joining them. We’ll have more about them in another post soon.

Kubernetes is a container orchestration engine. Instead of developing large monolithic applications that sit on virtual machines, containers run a small part of the application. As the components get smaller, it requires an orchestration layer to deliver the containers when needed and make them go away when they are not longer required. Kubernetes acts as the orchestra leader.

As Kubernetes, containerization and the cloud-native ethos it encompasses has grown, it has helped drive the enterprise shift to the cloud in general. If you can write your code once, and use it in the cloud or on prem, it means you don’t have to manage applications using different tool sets and that has had broad appeal for enterprises making the shift to the cloud.

TC Sessions: Enterprise (September 5 at San Francisco’s Yerba Buena Center) will take on the big challenges and promise facing enterprise companies today. TechCrunch’s editors will bring to the stage founders and leaders from established and emerging companies to address rising questions, like the promised revolution from machine learning and AI, intelligent marketing automation and the inevitability of the cloud, as well as the outer reaches of technology, like quantum computing and blockchain.

Tickets are now available for purchase on our website at the early-bird rate of $395; student tickets are just $75.

Student tickets are just $75 – grab them here.

We have a limited number of Startup Demo Packages available for $2,000, which includes four tickets to attend the event.

For each ticket purchased for TC Sessions: Enterprise, you will also be registered for a complimentary Expo Only pass to TechCrunch Disrupt SF on October 2-4.

Extra Crunch offers members the opportunity to tune into conference calls led and moderated by the TechCrunch writers you read every day. This week, TechCrunch’s Frederic Lardinois and Ron Miller discuss major announcements that came out of the Linux Foundation’s European KubeCon/CloudNativeCon conference and discuss the future of Kubernetes and cloud-native technologies.

Nearly doubling in size year-over-year, this year’s KubeCon conference brought big news and big players, with major announcements coming from some of the world’s largest software vendors including Google, AWS, Microsoft, Red Hat, and more. Frederic and Ron discuss how the Kubernetes project grew to such significant scale and which new initiatives in cloud-native development show the most promise from both a developer and enterprise perspective.

“This ecosystem starts sprawling, and we’ve got everything from security companies to service mesh companies to storage companies. Everybody is here. The whole hall is full of them. Sometimes it’s hard to distinguish between them because there are so many competing start-ups at this point.

I’m pretty sure we’re going to see a consolidation in the next six months or so where some of the bigger players, maybe Oracle, maybe VMware, will start buying some of these smaller companies. And I’m sure the show floor will look quite different about a year from now. All the big guys are here because they’re all trying to figure out what’s next.”

Frederic and Ron also dive deeper into the startup ecosystem rapidly developing around Kubernetes and other cloud-native technologies and offer their take on what areas of opportunity may prove to be most promising for new startups and founders down the road.

For access to the full transcription and the call audio, and for the opportunity to participate in future conference calls, become a member of Extra Crunch. Learn more and try it for free. 

Who expects a $34 billion deal involving two enterprise powerhouses to drop on a Sunday afternoon, but IBM and Red Hat surprised us yesterday when they pulled the trigger on a historically large deal.

IBM has been a poster child for a company moving through a painful transformation. As Box CEO (and IBM business partner) Aaron Levie put it on Twitter, sometimes a company has to make a bold move to push that kind of initiative forward:

Brilliant move by IBM. Transformation requires big bets, and this is a good one.

— Aaron Levie (@levie) October 28, 2018

They believe they can take their complex mix of infrastructure/software/platform services and emerging technologies like artificial intelligence, blockchain and analytics, and blend all of that with Red Hat’s profitable fusion of enterprise open source tools, cloud native, hybrid cloud and a keen understanding of the enterprise.

As Jon Shieber pointed out yesterday, it was a tacit acknowledgement that company was not going to get the results it was hoping for with emerging technologies like Watson artificial intelligence. It needed something that translated more directly into sales.

Red Hat can be that enterprise sales engine. It already is a company on a $3 billion revenue run rate, and it has a goal of hitting $5 billion. While that’s somewhat small potatoes for a company like IBM that generates $19 billion a quarter, it represents a crucial addition.

That’s because in spite of its iffy earnings reports over the last five years, Synergy Research reported that IBM had 7 percent of the cloud infrastructure market in its most recent report, which it defines as Infrastructure as a Service, Platform as a Service and hosted private cloud. It is the latter that IBM is particularly good at.

The company has the pieces in place now and a decent amount of marketshare, but Red Hat gives it a much more solid hybrid cloud story to tell. They can potentially bridge that hosted private cloud business with their own public cloud (and presumably even those of their competitors) and use Red Hat as a cloud native and open source springboard, giving their sales teams a solid story to tell.

IBM already has a lot of enterprise credibility on its own, of course. It sells on top of many of the same open source tools as Red Hat, but it hasn’t been getting the sales and revenue momentum that Red Hat has enjoyed. If you combine the enormous IBM sales engine and their services business with that of Red Hat, you have the potential to crank this into a huge business.

Photo: Ron Mller

It’s worth noting that the deal needs to pass shareholder muster and clear global regulatory hurdles before they can combine the two organizations. IBM has predicted that it will take at least until the second half of next year to close this deal and it could take even longer.

IBM has to use that time wisely and well to make sure when they pull the trigger, these two companies blend as smoothly as possible across technology and culture. It’s never easy to make these mega deals work with so much money and pressure involved, but it is imperative that Big Blue not screw this up. This could very well represent its last best chance to right the ship once and for all.

Armory, a startup that has built a CI/CD platform on top the open source Spinnaker project, announced a $10 million Series A today led by Crosslink Capital. Other investors included Bain Capital Ventures, Javelin Venture Partners, Y Combinator and Robin Vasan.

Software development certainly has changed over the last several years, going from long cycles between updates to a continuous delivery model. The concept is actually called CI/CD or continuous integration/continuous delivery. Armory’s product is designed to eliminate some of the complexity associated with deploying this kind of solution.

When they started the company, the founders made a decision to hitch their wagon to Spinnaker, a project that had the backing of industry heavyweights like Google and Netflix. “Spinnaker would become an emerging standard for enabling truly multi-cloud deployments at scale. Instead of re-creating the wheel and building another in-house continuous delivery platform, we made a big bet on having Spinnaker at the core of Armory’s Platform,” company CEO and co-founder Daniel R. Odio wrote in a blog post announcing the funding.

The bet apparently paid off and the company’s version of Spinnaker is widely deployed enterprise solution (at least according to them). The startup’s ultimate goal is to help Fortune 2000 companies deploy software much faster — and accessing and understanding CI/CD is a big part of that.

As every company out there becomes a software company, they find themselves outside their comfort zones. While Google and Netflix and other hyper-scale organizations have learned to deploy software at startling speed using state of the art methodologies, it’s not so easy for most companies with much smaller engineering teams to pull off.

That’s where a company like Armory could come into play. It takes this open source project and it packages it in such a way that it simplifies (to an extent) the complex world that these larger companies operate in on a regular basis, putting Spinnaker and CI/CD concepts in reach of organizations whose core competency might not involve sophisticated software deployment.

All of this relates to multi-cloud and cloud-native approaches to software development, which lets you manage your applications and infrastructure wherever they live across any cloud vendor or even on-prem in consistent way. Being able to manage continuous deployment is part of that.

Armory launched in 2016 and is based in the Bay area. It has raised a total of $14 million with a $4 million seed round coming last year. They were also a member of the Y Combinator Winter 2017 class and count Y Combinator as an investor in this round.