Rafay Launches Automation Framework for Containerized App Lifecycle Management 

Sunnyvale, Calif.,  September 12, 2019  —  Rafay Systems today announced the general availability of its SaaS offering designed to address the complex challenges companies face when modernizing their applications. The company also announced $8 million in Series A funding led by Ridge Ventures with participation from NTT DOCOMO Ventures, Costanoa Ventures and Moment Ventures. The company previously raised $4.1 million in seed funding.

DevOps and site reliability engineering (SRE) teams face a steep learning curve and ongoing complexity when running containerized applications in Kubernetes clusters in cloud and on-premise environments. Rafay’s application abstraction, cluster blueprinting, multi-cluster operations and enterprise-ready integration capabilities collectively address the acute pain these teams face. Companies can leverage Rafay to accelerate their application modernization journeys and deliver new applications to market faster.

“Kubernetes is a crucial innovation that has fast-tracked the industry’s adoption of containerized applications running in any cloud, hybrid or edge environment,” said Haseeb Budhani, CEO and Cofounder, Rafay Systems. “But Kubernetes presents a steep learning curve to companies embarking on app modernization journeys.  At Rafay, we are on a mission to make Kubernetes easy to consume by any company, regardless of how far along they are on their journey. The Rafay platform empowers DevOps teams to focus on their business critical software development instead of building and maintaining complex internal tools.”

“Rafay represents a successful, experienced team bringing innovation to a market ripe for disruption,” said Ben Metcalfe, investor at Ridge Ventures. “Just as Amazon created an entire cloud industry based on unifying and abstracting disparate open source tools, we see parallels for revolutionizing software automation, management, and app distribution. We believe Rafay has a major role to play in that transformation. Rafay saw this gap and has built a comprehensive platform that every enterprise can use.”

Rafay’s unique capabilities include:

• Application Abstraction: Rafay's prescriptive application framework makes it easy to define and manage lifecycle for containerized apps - from deployment to ongoing operations.
• Cluster Blueprinting: Rafay's Kubernetes cluster management and customization capabilities ensure reliable cluster operations and efficient bring-up in any environment.
• Multi-cluster Operations: Rafay’s container and metadata distribution capabilities make it easy to deploy and operate containerized applications across any number of Kubernetes clusters, spread across any number of regions or hybrid environments.
• Enterprise Integrations: Rafay's broad suite of one-click productivity features simplify the adoption of critical technologies, such as secrets management, runtime configuration updates, and log & metrics aggregation.

Rafay’s platform is receiving strong validation and support from customers such as SonicWall. “SonicWall is committed to the cloud-native paradigm and to delivering our market-leading security portfolio to our customers via the cloud,” said Atul Dhablania, Senior Vice President and Chief Operating Officer at SonicWall. “Team Rafay has impressed us with their expertise in container orchestration and management, and their SaaS-based lifecycle management offering for containerized applications clearly accelerates the application modernization journey for companies. We are looking forward to collaborating with Team Rafay.”

The market for application containerization, which helps enterprises modernize legacy applications and create new, scalable cloud-native applications, is both big and accelerating. 451 Research says the application container market will grow to $3 billion by 2022. According to Gartner Distinguished VP Analyst Arun Chandrasekaran, “by 2022, more than 75% of global organizations will be running containerized applications in production, which is a significant increase from fewer than 30% today.”1

About Rafay Systems

Rafay Systems delivers a turnkey SaaS offering that automates lifecycle management for containerized applications. DevOps and SRE (Site Reliability Engineering) teams can leverage Rafay to significantly reduce the complexity they face today when deploying and operating applications in Kubernetes environments, resulting in faster time to market for new business capabilities. Rafay’s application abstraction, cluster blueprinting and enterprise-ready integration features make it the ideal platform for cloud and hybrid deployments. The company is backed by Ridge

Source: Rafay Systems