Kubernetes operations platform gets more funding

Rafay helps platform teams move beyond traditional Kubernetes cluster management to streamlined Kubernetes operations for modern applications.

Rafay Systems Kubernetes operations platform gets $25M in funding

Rafay Systems, the platform for Kubernetes Operations, has announced a $25 million Series B funding round led by ForgePoint Capital, with participation from existing investors Ridge Ventures, Costanoa Ventures, and Moment Ventures. Rafay will use this infusion of funds to continue hiring world-class engineers and grow its sales, marketing, and customer success teams.

Rafay’s new funding will accelerate its strategic vision for the company’s Kubernetes Operations Platform, the industry’s first and only offering that unifies lifecycle management requirements for both Kubernetes infrastructure and modern applications. Delivered as a cloud-native service, the platform brings together capabilities for application automation, security, visibility, and governance, while streamlining the operations of Kubernetes across all environments. The long-term vision for Kubernetes Operations is based on Rafay’s work with customers in the financial, healthcare, telecom, and technology sectors who are rapidly adopting containerized applications.

"Kubernetes has become the de-facto choice for containerization and application modernization, but organizations' Kubernetes journeys have been bottlenecked because of the complexity involved in enterprise-grade deployments making a comprehensive management platform a necessity. The Rafay team has built a highly innovative and differentiated platform that solves gating problems for organizations adopting and scaling Kubernetes deployments. We are extremely delighted to be partnering with them as they create the future of Kubernetes Operations," said Leo Casusol, Venture Partner at ForgePoint Capital who will be joining the board.

Today, enterprises are developing and deploying modern applications more than ever. By 2025, over 90% of new apps will be Cloud Native (Source: IDC). But the operational cost, complexity, and resources required to manage the lifecycle of Kubernetes infrastructure and these new modern applications running on it are growing out of control.

To address these challenges, companies are establishing platform teams to leverage existing point solutions and build in-house operations practices. These platform teams span multiple internal organizations (e.g. enterprise architecture, SRE, DevOps, and security) to manage the complexity inherent in managing Kubernetes infrastructure and the applications being deployed and managed on top of it. Until now, these platform teams have made do with disparate tools and internally developed code, which has led to many modern application initiatives running woefully behind schedule and over budget.

Rafay’s Vision for Kubernetes Operations

In order to deliver modern applications and infrastructure at the speed and efficiency enterprises demand, Rafay sees a fundamental need to extend beyond traditional Kubernetes management into a Kubernetes Operations mindset: a holistic approach that unifies the lifecycle management of both Kubernetes infrastructure and the modern applications built on it. Instead of reinventing the same Kubernetes Operations wheel at a significant cost and over long periods of time, enterprises can now leverage Rafay’s Kubernetes Operations Platform to speed up enterprise-wide initiatives. It augments the enterprise platform team through the broad set of services offered within the platform, partnering with them to accelerate application modernization initiatives.

With Rafay, developers, DevOps, operations, and security teams can work together to deploy modern applications as much as 4x faster while reducing downtime by 60% and eliminating security and compliance risks. By leveraging the Kubernetes Operations Platform developers, SREs and DevOps teams can triage infrastructure and application issues faster than ever before, significantly reducing mean-time-to-resolution (MTTR).

Enterprises can take advantage of the benefits of Rafay no matter where they are in their application modernization journey. The platform’s breakthrough operations-centric approach is unique in the market as it enhances the effectiveness of all tools and processes that comprise today’s modern, containerized application delivery. It works with any infrastructure (e.g., in data centers, public clouds such as AWS, Azure, and GCP or at remote/Edge locations), and can help enterprises operate managed Kubernetes services such as Amazon EKS and Microsoft AKS, along with packaged offerings such as RedHat OpenShift.

Rafay’s Kubernetes Operations Platform delivers a number of platform services, including:

Cluster Management Service: Enables the lifecycle management and blueprinting support for managed Kubernetes services, such as Amazon EKS and Azure AKS, as well as offerings such as RedHat OpenShift. This service also incorporates logs/metrics collection, storage management, and secrets management.

GitOps Service: Enables infrastructure orchestration and application deployment through multi-stage, git-triggered pipelines.

Zero-Trust Access Service: Enables controlled, audited access for developers, SREs, and automation systems to Kubernetes infrastructure, with just-in-time service account creation and user-level credentials management.

Kubernetes Policy Management Service: Enable policy management for clusters via the Open Policy Agent (OPA) framework for Kubernetes security and governance.

Backup & Restore Service: Enables disaster recovery and migration of the Kubernetes control plane and application data.

Visibility & Monitoring Service: Enables development, operations, and security/governance teams to visualize and monitor applications and underlying Kubernetes infrastructure through dedicated dashboards.

“Every new industry starts with a number of point solutions solving different problems. The Kubernetes industry started the same way but is now hitting an inflection point where enterprises are spending too much time cobbling together multiple tools and home-grown automation code for Kubernetes operations. Application modernization initiatives deserve a modern approach to Kubernetes operations. One that brings together the lifecycle management of both infrastructure and modern applications. This latest round of funding will help us bolster Rafay’s leadership as the leader in the Kubernetes operations market,” said Haseeb Budhani, CEO of Rafay Systems.

According to Gartner’s Market Guide for Container Management (February 18, 2021), “The growth of the enterprise container management market will be influenced by the growth of net new application development and application modernization efforts. These efforts are leveraging containers to enable agility and speed of application development pipelines. Container adoption will increase at a rapid pace during the next few years.”