CloudZero (http://www.cloudzero.com), the first and only site reliability management platform for cloud computing, announces it has closed $5 million Series A venture capital, led by Matrix Partners and Underscore VC. Tim Barrows from Matrix Partners and Michael Skok from Underscore will join the board of directors. CloudZero will use the venture funding to open its company headquarters in Boston, grow its enterprise SaaS platform, and increase investment in its open source community.
With the evolution to cloud, trusted reliability has become an elusive component of system architecture. Undesirable system behavior emerges faster than ever as businesses evolve their infrastructure and deploy microservices, APIs, and serverless technology. The complexity of the systems compound and the ability to maintain trusted reliability throughout the system and its lifecycle is very difficult to achieve and maintain. Emergent behavior, the unpredictable and chaotic interaction between individual parts of complex systems, arises naturally and is the turbulent reality in cloud environments; yet this behavior is completely untracked and unmanaged today. Estimates show that as much as "40-90% of the total costs of a system" occur after launch and emergent behavior is a primary reason why.
"Major system outages have become the new spectator sport of the cloud computing era, costing companies' big money and customers," said CloudZero Founder and CEO Erik Peterson. "CloudZero is focused on the only thing that matters; ensuring your systems will perform even when the cloud environment they run in is unpredictable, chaotic, and constantly operating under pressure."
Site Reliability Management is the continuous optimization of cloud systems for high reliability. A reliable cloud system is trusted: continuously resilient, available, and secure. CloudZero's site reliability platform (currently in invite-only beta) identifies system fragility so that engineers may proactively optimize reliability before trust is compromised. The company's SaaS platform continuously models the changing surface of your cloud system, as it continuously operates under pressure, providing insights that deliver trusted reliability.
"Reliability has always been important and we're seeing firsthand how quickly it can degrade in cloud environments and bring business operations to a halt; when that happens businesses lose money and people lose jobs," stated Tim Barrows, General Partner at Matrix Partners. "With cloud technologies now at the heart of IT operations, the market size and growth potential for site reliability management solutions is immense."
"In today's increasingly cloud dependent world, the need for trust at scale is requiring Development, Operations, and Security to be fully integrated," stated Michael Skok, Founding Partner at Underscore VC. "CloudZero's founders proved themselves from the earliest stages, collaborating with us and our DevOps and Security Core Community members as they identified the market opportunity, evolved their vision, and validated the market need."
More than a dozen Underscore VC Core members are investing their time and money, to partner with the CloudZero team, including Corey Thomas, CEO of Rapid 7; Bob Brennan, former CEO Veracode, and Executive Director, CA Technologies; Jim Chilton, CIO of Cengage; and Don Bulens, former CEO Unidesk, EqualLogic, and Underscore Core Community member; who are all joining the company's advisory board.
"We loved working with the CloudZero team as they co-created their breakthrough with Core members, dozens of customers, and an open source community - something we deeply believe in," continued Michael Skok.
The company is also announcing a new open source project: CloudZero Reactor for AWS. The Reactor normalizes metadata from various services in AWS accounts and then provides a simple interface to query the information. The Reactor also enables the CloudZero platform to model a system's surface, providing insights and context into past, present and future states of systems. These insights enable engineers to discover and correct emergent behavior and learn why that behavior exists in the first place. Download the CloudZero Reactor at http://www.cloudzero.com/products/reactor.
"With their multi-disciplinary backgrounds and records of success this team is uniquely qualified to bring order to the complexity and chaos in today's turbulent multi cloud weather systems," stated Don Bulens, Underscore Core Community member. "This team will bring trust and never before seen reliability to cloud systems with their site reliability platform."
About CloudZero:
For engineers and teams responsible for development, operations, and security, the whole lifecycle of an application, who need to discover and correct undesirable behavior and know why that behavior exists in their cloud environments, CloudZero is the first to provide site reliability management, that enables engineers to make cloud systems resilient, available, and secure. CloudZero's SaaS platform continuously models the changing surface of a cloud environment, as it operates under pressure, providing insights to manage and deliver trusted reliability. Unlike any other technology, the CloudZero platform predicts system fragility so that engineers may proactively optimize reliability before trust is compromised.