Personal blog of Yzmir Ramirez

Stackery, a 4-year old Portland startup, wants to help development teams deliver serverless resources on AWS more easily, and today it announced several enhancements to the platform.

With serverless applications, the development team outlines a set of trigger events and the cloud infrastructure vendor — in this case AWS — provides the exact amount of required resources to run the event and no more. This frees developers from having to worry about provisioning the proper amount of resources to run the application.

“Stackery is a secure serverless platform for AWS. We’re geared toward teams who are moving from laptop through production, and [we provide the tools] that they need to design, develop, and then deliver modern applications for those teams,” Stackery CEO Tim Zonca told TechCrunch.

In general, the product helps create a virtual whiteboard, where development teams can build serverless applications in a highly visual way, then it helps with testing and deployment of the app on AWS. Zonca says that the updates they are announcing today focus on building in security and governance into the platform, while offering a full set of continuous delivery tools in a modern git-driven delivery system.

“We realized that we could fill in some of the gaps [for developers] and help them take what we have developed as a set of best practices around securely delivering applications over the course of the last year, and just bake them into the product, so that those teams don’t have to think about those practices in a serverless world,” Zonca explained.

For starters, they are offering a code review for known vulnerabilities as they pop the application into their git repository, whether that’s Bitbucket, GitLab or GitHub. “We’ve introduced the ability to audit function code for known vulnerabilities, and we do this by just using common tooling out there,” he said.

The company is also helping test that code, which gets a bit tricky when ephemeral serverless infrastructure is involved. “We allow people to automate the spinning up of temporary ephemeral testing environments, and then help them plug in the automation for their system testing or integration testing or unit testing, and even provide an environment associated with this pull request for humans to go in and actually log on and do usability testing,” Zonca said.

When an application has passed all the testing, and is ready to be deployed to staging or production environments, Stackery can automatically promote that change set. Companies can then choose to do a final review before deployment or simply allow it to deploy automatically once the application passes all the contingencies the team set up.

Stackery was founded in 2016. It has raised $7.4 million, according to Crunchbase data.

When Stackery’s founders were still at New Relic in 2014, they recognized there was an opportunity to provide instrumentation for the emerging serverless tech market. They left the company after New Relic’s IPO and founded Stackery with the goal of providing a governance and management layer for serverless architecture.

The company had a couple of big announcements today starting with their $5.5 million round, which they are calling a “seed plus” — and a new tool for tracking serverless performance called the Health Metrics Dashboard.

Let’s start with the funding round. Why the Seed Plus designation? Company co-founder and CEO Nathan Taggart says they could have done an A round, but the designation was a reflection of the reality of where their potential market is today. “From our perspective, there was an appetite for an A, but the Seed Plus represents the current stage of the market,” he said. That stage is still emerging as companies begin to see the benefits of the serverless approach.

HWVP led the round. Voyager Capital, Pipeline Capital Partners, and Founders’ Co-op also participated. Today’s investment brings the total raised to $7.3 million since the company was founded in 2016.

Serverless computing like AWS Lambda or Azure Functions is a bit of a misnomer. There is a server underlying the program, but instead of maintaining a dedicated server for your particular application, you only pay when there is a trigger event. Like cloud computing that came before, developers love it because it saves them a ton of time configuring (or begging) for resources for their applications.

But as with traditional cloud computing — serverless is actually a cloud service — developers can easily access it. If you think back to the Consumerization of IT phenomenon that began around 2011, it was this ability to procure cloud services so easily that resulted in a loss of control inside organizations.

As back then, companies want the advantages of serverless technology, but they also want to know how much they are paying, who’s using it and that it’s secure and in compliance with all the rules of the organization. That’s where Stackery comes in.

As for the new Health Metrics Dashboard, that’s an extension of this vision, one that fits in quite well with the monitoring roots of the founders. Serverless often involves containers, which can encompass many functions. When something goes wrong it’s hard to trace what the root cause was.

Stackery Health Metrics Dashboard. Photo: Stackery

“We are showing architecture-wide throughput and performance at each resource point and [developers] can figure out where there are bottlenecks, performance problems or failure.

The company launched in 2016. It is based in Portland, Oregon and currently has 9 employees, of which five are engineers. They plan to bring on three more by the end of the year.