A trio of cloud industry leaders have launched a new company with a mission to modernize software configuration data management.
Emerging from today’s stealth with $4 million in funding, Configub is handicrafted by CEO Alexis Richardson, founder of Cloud-Native Container Management Platform Weaveworks. CTO Brian Grant, former Google Software Engineer and original lead architect for Kubernetes. CPO Jesper Joergensen also played a variety of product roles in Salesforce (including Heroku) before joining Twilio to lead the audio, video and platform teams.
Richardson told TechCrunch that their new company is beginning to “get people out of Config Hell.”
If this makes you silly, let me explain, “Huh?” Last July, CrowdStrike issued a misconfiguration update for its Falcon sensor security software, causing widespread disruption and more than $5 billion in losses for Forting 500 companies. Delta said it had lost $500 million as a result of the flight’s destruction and kickstarted what would become a long legal battle to recover the losses.
The event demonstrated that software is a critical infrastructure and creates powerful systems and applications along with the web of interdependent components connected by APIs. However, if a portion of that web purposefully compromises, or otherwise, you can defeat not only the entire house but the entire town.
This will display the configuration data. This will help you understand how all these different parts work well with each other and how the software and system work. However, these configuration files can be awkward and confusion, and Configub is setting it up to deal with just that.
“The problem is that configuration data is scattered everywhere. It’s a complete spread,” Richardson said.
DevOps fixes
The way software is deployed and managed has changed dramatically over the past 30 years. In the old days, enterprise software was likely deployed via CD-ROMs on localized hardware, and the configuration was limited to several text files that directed the operating system or application that found what needed to run properly.
It’s not that easy today. Gargantuan configuration files with thousands of lines of code are often required to run software in dynamic, large environments.
Joergensen says he learned valuable lessons on Heroku (as a platform owned by Salesforce as a service). The code and configuration data are not the same and require a very different approach. Configuration data defines system settings and behaviors that cannot be debugged in the same way that software code can. However, understanding this data is essential to avoid costly misconceptions that can cause outages and delays, even using tools like Terraform and Kubernetes.
“We have made great strides in evolving coding practices using tools like GitHub,” says Joergensen. “But configuring live infrastructure requires a different approach. It’s not just a bunch of files. Our goal is to bring the elegant app developer experience that Heroku was pioneered by, to all kinds of production operations.”
Therefore, Configub promises to “unify compliance and configuration management with the latest automated development workflows.” Instead of having to go hunting for the right configuration to accommodate a particular error, Configub keeps everything in a single database, making it easier to find configurations and fills up with live views showing what the system is actually doing.
“So if a customer has no access to the system, they should be able to see and experience what they are seeing and experiencing,” Richardson added. “The configuration data within the system is a representation of a live production system. This allows teams to not only identify the data, but also make changes to ensure that customer issues can be quickly corrected.”
Products offered via the SAAS model will initially focus on Kubernetes DevOps tools such as Helm, Argo, Flux, Terraform and its open source fork opentof. Richardson says Configub is already working with several “medium to large” enterprise design partners, but has not revealed the name.
As the product is still a few months after its official launch, today’s announcement is to introduce Configub to the world and announce its $4 million investment. Funds come from several prominent VCs and angel investors, including crane venture partners, encoded ventures, peer VCs, poolside CEOs, Jason Warner.
AI Factor
The Cloud Strike episode was one of the most expensive compositional cleaners these days, but it was not an isolated incident in any stretch.
“Configuration changes have long been known as the leading cause of cloud system failures,” Grant told TechCrunch.
For example, last year, Australia’s superannuation fund Unisuper was hit by a suspension that left 500,000 members without accessing its account after Google’s misunderstanding removed Unisuper’s Google Cloud VMware Engine (GCVE) private cloud.
In January, a configuration error in GitHub’s cloud meant that all GIT operations were unavailable for up to 2 hours.
The problem will get worse. AI complicates problems when companies compete to embed AI in the fabric of their software.
“AI will not only reduce the code writing, but the way the whole world writes, creates and operates software entirely,” Warner said in a statement. “The coming years are more than just a vibe about small changes to the Greenfield codebase. Companies need mature solutions to difficult problems.
Of course, companies can already build their own solutions from the blending of tools such as Terraform, Kubernetes, Prometheus, and more. However, these can be overly complicated to set up and manage.
Some well-known incumbents include ServiceNow and Atlassian, which provide services to address configuration issues. However, such companies were founded over 20 years ago before cloud computing actually began. Furthermore, many such companies have long expanded into the areas of HR, CRMS, team collaboration and project management.
“These types of tools are not suitable for modern stacks of dynamic, cloud-native, AI-driven containerized applications,” added Richardson. “If that means that AI will display company data and publish it on the Internet, then someone can’t try to deploy AI.”
3 is the cloud
Before Configub, Richardson founded an enterprise-centric cloud messaging company called RabbitMQ. RabbitMQ was acquired in 2010 by Springsource, a subsidiary of VMware. In 2014 he founded Weaveworks. At Weaveworks, Richardson also developed the Gitops Framework. It is widely used in Cloud-Native and Kubernetes environments for managing infrastructure and application deployments.
Richardson officially closed its store back then in February last year, a result of a “lump” sales and a shortage of fresh capitals. So in mid-2024 he began Configb in collaboration with Grant and Jorgensen.
Grant and Richardson met through their work at the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), which counted Kubernetes as their first project after Google’s donation in 2015. However, this eventually lined up and Weaveworks ended too early last year.
Jumping from one of the planet’s biggest tech companies into the startup world seems like a big transition. However, Grant worked for two startups before Google. One was the chief architect of a small startup called Peakstream, which Google acquired in 2007.
“I was the third engineer there. When we started, we didn’t even have a name, we didn’t have an office, we didn’t have a business plan either,” Grant said. “So I’ve done a very early startup before.”
Google has continued to grow exponentially for 17 years at the company, but Grant’s involvement in Kubernetes, which Google Sourced in 2014, was a bit similar to working at a startup.
“Kubernetes started out as just four engineers and a product manager. We didn’t even have a common manager. We all reported to different people,” Grant continued. “It was very similar to a startup in itself.”
Meanwhile, Richardson met Joergensen around the time VMware obtained RabbitMQ over a decade ago. After serving in various senior roles in some of the world’s largest high-tech companies, Jorgensen also chose to step into the world of startups.
“We can accomplish more than ever. We’re diving into AI’s RIP current. We probably don’t want to be anywhere else now,” Joergensen said. “A startup has a clear view of what you can do.”
Source link
