Advanced Computing in the Age of AI | Saturday, April 20, 2024

Kubernetes-Native DevOps Gains Steam 

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Application development tool vendors continue to attract investors as enterprise DevOps teams look to automate workflows that will accelerate continuous integration and delivery capabilities for application container and microservices that increasingly extend to cloud deployments.

The latest beneficiary is Codefresh, the Kubernetes-native DevOps tools startup that announced a $27 million funding round this week. The Series C round brings the six-year-old company’s venture capital total to $42 million.

The funding round was led by Red Dot Capital Partners. Shasta Ventures joined existing investors CreditEase Israel Innovation Fund, Hillsven, Microsoft’s M12 venture fund, Vertex Ventures and Viola Ventures.

Yaniv Stern, a Red Dot managing partner, will join the Codefresh board, the company said Monday (June 29). Isaac Roth, a partner at Shasta Ventures, will join the Codefresh advisory board. Roth previously led Red Hat’s OpenShift development team.

Roth praised the startup’s CI/CD implementation on the Kubernetes cluster orchestrator as addressing DevOps workflows frequently hindered by “complex and outdated tooling.”

The Codefresh framework aims to simplify adoption of Kubernetes by DevOps teams as enterprises embrace cloud-native application development. “Demand for a modern DevOps platform that helps engineering teams adopt and optimize workflows for Kubernetes is very high,” said Codefresh CEO Raziel Tabib. The startup’s value proposition includes reducing the cost of maintaining legacy tool chains and replacing them with cloud-native workflows to speed software delivery.

In a blog post announcing the investment round, Tabib said the new funding would be used for additional open source investments, including GitOps and Canary. GitOps is a framework for implementing continuous deployment of cloud-native applications. Canary deployments involve staggered code deployments to small groups that are intended to catch and fix bugs.

Those efforts are part of a larger enterprise movement toward what Kubernetes promoters such as the Cloud Native Computing Foundation call “DevOps in a box.” For example, a recently accepted CNCF incubator project called Argo is being used by member companies for building and running cloud-native workflows and applications on Kubernetes using GitOps.

Codefresh also promotes its container-based approach as both “git- and cloud-agnostic,” thereby expanding the number of tools and platforms for delivering continuous integration and delivery.

 

About the author: George Leopold

George Leopold has written about science and technology for more than 30 years, focusing on electronics and aerospace technology. He previously served as executive editor of Electronic Engineering Times. Leopold is the author of "Calculated Risk: The Supersonic Life and Times of Gus Grissom" (Purdue University Press, 2016).

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