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Dev tools are not sexy. They are generally practical tools built solely to increase the productivity of development organizations and nothing more. But that was all before Codefresh came along. When co-founders Raziel Tabib (CEO) and Oleg Verhovsky (CTO) demoed Codefresh to me for the first time, I was blown away and immediately fell in love with both the product and the team, and their endless passion to change the way developers work.
The fact that container architecture has taken the development world by storm is undeniable. It’s been the greatest revolution in software architecture in decades, and the only one that was conceived and perfected to take full advantage of the infinite flexibility which is required in the cloud era. Its adoption has been faster than the adoption of any previous architecture change, like web services or virtualization, for example.
But, the ecosystem that has been created still has significant holes that prevent it from moving center stage in production:
Like many other infrastructure innovations, the container ecosystem is based on open source, with Docker leading the market. While open source allows for fast bottom-up adoption of technology, it often faces obstacles to becoming mainstream production: Command line interfaces and local installation may be OK for early adopters but often they’re not good enough to become mainstream.
The container stack today is comprised mostly of two elements: First, a development environment that allows the construction of a single container, and second, the orchestration layer (e.g. Docker Swarm, Mesosphere and Google’s Kubernetes) that manages the production environment. This requires significant manual iterations and heavy reliance on DEV/OPS people.
We believe the ecosystem hasn’t come to understand (yet) that the shift to writing applications through the use of containers is going to completely change the development lifecycle. A fairly simple application could end up being comprised of hundreds of Microservices. But where is the single repository that acts as the “master library” of the organization? How can one even know which of the Microservices has gone through all of the phases of continuous integration, testing, security checks, interoperability and deployment?
This huge gap in the ecosystem is exactly what Raziel and Oleg came together to solve with Codefresh. They have developed a complete cloud based Container Lifecycle Management (CLM) which acts as a single platform that stitches together the different container technologies (engine, registries, orchestration, etc.) and allows developers to instantly run their code changes in the full application context while taking care of the repeatable testing, integration and deployment cycles.
Throughout the due diligence process, the feedback was amazing. Dev teams that have been using the product have said that they “simply can’t go back to doing it any other way”.
We at Viola Ventures are great believers that in order for an open source technology to become mainstream it needs to be delivered as a user-friendly, productive, scalable and no-touch environment even to a technical target market like developers. We have done it successfully with Perfecto Mobile in application testing and with Redis Labs in providing the fastest DB in the world as an easy to use scalable DBaaS, and now we are adding Codefresh to transform the way organization are building their containers stack.
On a personal note, I’d like to wish Raziel, Oleg and the entire Codefresh team the best of luck! I’m looking forward to the great journey ahead.
More on our investment in Codefresh:
Codefresh CEO Raziel Tabib: This new capital will help us take microservices architectures mainstream (Calcalist)
Israeli Docker image life cycle automation startup Codefresh brings in $7 million (Geektime)
Codefresh Raises $7 Million In Funding Amidst Record Adoption Of Software Containers (TheStreet)
