Personal blog of Yzmir Ramirez

Netlify, the startup that wants to kill the web server and change the way developers build websites, announced a $53 million Series C today.

EQT Ventures Fund led the round with contributions from existing investors Andreessen Horowitz and Kleiner Perkins and newcomer Preston-Werner Ventures. Under the terms of the deal Laura Yao, deal partner and investment advisor at EQT Ventures will be joining the Netlify board. The startup has now raised $97 million, according to the company.

Like many startups recently, Netlify’s co-founder Chris Bach says they weren’t looking for new funding, but felt with the company growing rapidly, it would be prudent to take the money to help continue that growth.

While Bach and CEO Matt Biilmann didn’t want to discuss valuation, they said it was “very generous” and in line with how they see their business. Neither did they want to disclose specific revenue figures, but did say that the company has tripled revenue three years running.

One thing fueling that growth is the sheer number of developers joining the platform. When we spoke to the company for its Series B in 2018, it had 300,000 sign-ups. Today that number has ballooned to 800,000.

As we wrote about the company in a 2018 article, it wants to change the way people develop web sites:

“Netlify has abstracted away the concept of a web server, which it says is slow to deploy and hard to secure and scale. By shifting from a monolithic website to a static front end with back-end microservices, it believes it can solve security and scaling issues and deliver the site much faster.”

While developer popularity is a good starting point, getting larger customers on board is the ultimate goal that will drive more revenue, and the company wants to use its new injection of capital to build the enterprise side of the business. Current enterprise customers include Google, Facebook, Citrix and Unilever.

Netlify has grown from 38 to 97 employees since the beginning of last year and hopes to reach 180 by year’s end.

Services meshes. They are the hot new thing in the cloud native computing world. At KubeCon, the bi-annual festival of all things cloud native, Microsoft today announced that it is teaming up with a number of companies in this space to create a generic service mesh interface. This will make it easier for developers to adopt the concept without locking them into a specific technology.

In a world where the number of network endpoints continues to increase as developers launch new micro-services, containers and other systems at a rapid clip, they are making the network smarter again by handling encryption, traffic management and other functions so that the actual applications don’t have to worry about that. With a number of competing service mesh technologies, though, including the likes of Istio and Linkerd, developers currently have to choose which one of these to support.

“I’m really thrilled to see that we were able to pull together a pretty broad consortium of folks from across the industry to help us drive some interoperability in the service mesh space,” Gabe Monroy, Microsoft’s lead product manager for containers and the former CTO of Deis, told me. “This is obviously hot technology — and for good reasons. The cloud-native ecosystem is driving the need for smarter networks and smarter pipes and service mesh technology provides answers.”

The partners here include Buoyant, HashiCorp, Solo.io, Red Hat, AspenMesh, Weaveworks, Docker, Rancher, Pivotal, Kinvolk and VMware . That’s a pretty broad coalition, though it notably doesn’t include cloud heavyweights like Google, the company behind Istio, and AWS.

“In a rapidly evolving ecosystem, having a set of common standards is critical to preserving the best possible end-user experience,” said Idit Levine, founder and CEO of Solo.io. “This was the vision behind SuperGloo — to create an abstraction layer for consistency across different meshes, which led us to the release of Service Mesh Hub last week. We are excited to see service mesh adoption evolve into an industry-level initiative with the SMI specification.”

For the time being, the interoperability features focus on traffic policy, telemetry and traffic management. Monroy argues that these are the most pressing problems right now. He also stressed that this common interface still allows the different service mesh tools to innovate and that developers can always work directly with their APIs when needed. He also stressed that the Service Mesh Interface (SMI), as this new specification is called, does not provide any of its own implementations of these features. It only defines a common set of APIs.

Currently, the most well-known service mesh is probably Istio, which Google, IBM and Lyft launched about two years ago. SMI may just bring a bit more competition to this market since it will allow developers to bet on the overall idea of a service mesh instead of a specific implementation.

In addition to SMI, Microsoft also today announced a couple of other updates around its cloud-native and Kubernetes services. It announced the first alpha of the Helm 3 package manager, for example, as well as the 1.0 release of its Kubernetes extension for Visual Studio Code and the general availability of its AKS virtual nodes, using the open source Virtual Kubelet project.

Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) is an extension of DevOps designed for more complex environments. The problem is that this type of approach is difficult to implement and has usually only been in reach of large companies, requiring custom software. Blameless, a Bay Area startup, wants to put it reach of everyone. It emerged from stealth today with an SRE platform for the masses and around $20 million in funding.

For starters, the company announced two rounds of funding with $3.6 million in seed money last April and a $16.5 million Series A investment more recently in January. Investors included Accel,  Lightspeed Venture Partners and others.

Company co-founder and CEO Ashar Rizqi knows first-hand just how difficult it is to implement an SRE system. He built custom systems for Box and Mulesoft before launching Blameless two years ago. He and his co-founder COO Lyon Wong saw a gap in the market where companies who wanted to implement SRE were being limited because of a lack of tooling and decided to build it themselves.

Rizqi says SRE changes the way you work and interact and Blameless gives structure to that change. “It changes the way you communicate, prioritize and work, but we’re adding data and metrics to support that shift” he said.

Screenshot: Blameless

As companies move to containers and continuous delivery models, it brings a level of complexity to managing the developers, who are working to maintain the delivery schedule, and operations, who must make sure the latest builds get out with a minimum of bugs. It’s not easy to manage, especially given the speed involved.

Over time, the bugs build up and the blame circulates around the DevOps team as they surface. The company name comes because their platform should remove blame from the equation by providing the tooling to get deeper visibility into all aspects of the delivery model.

At that point, companies can understand more clearly the kinds of compromises they need to make to get products out the door, rather than randomly building up this technical debt over time. This is exacerbated by the fact that companies are building their software from a variety of sources, whether open source or API services, and it’s hard to know the impact that external code is having on your product.

“Technical debt is accelerating as there is greater reliability on micro services. It’s a black box. You don’t own all the lines of code you are executing,” Rizqi explained. His company’s solution is designed to help with that problem.

The company currently has 23 employees and 20 customers including DigitalOcean and Home Depot.

 Monitoring used to be a relatively simple matter. Most companies had a fixed number of applications to monitor. These were usually delivered on the web and lived for a number of years on a fairly fixed number of servers.
Today’s environment is far more varied and complex, and New Relic made a series of announcements today designed to help customers deal with new ways of delivering… Read More

 Weaveworks announced a $15 million Series B round today led by GV (the artist formerly known as Google Ventures). Accel, which invested in its earlier $5 million Series A also participated. The company has raised $20 million so far with this round. Weaveworks has created a set of open source tools for managing, monitoring and securing containers, the latest hot technology for developers… Read More