Monad emerges from stealth with $17M to solve the cybersecurity big data problem

Cloud security startup Monad, which offers a platform for extracting and connecting data from various security tools, has launched from stealth with $17 million in Series A funding led by Index Ventures. 

Monad was founded on the belief that enterprise cybersecurity is a growing data management challenge, as organizations try to understand and interpret the masses of information that’s siloed within disconnected logs and databases. Once an organization has extracted data from their security tools, Monad’s Security Data Platform enables them to centralize that data within a data warehouse of choice, and normalize and enrich the data so that security teams have the insights they need to secure their systems and data effectively.

“Security is fundamentally a big data problem,” said Christian Almenar, CEO and co-founder of Monad. “Customers are often unable to access their security data in the streamlined manner that DevOps and cloud engineering teams need to build their apps quickly while also addressing their most pressing security and compliance challenges. We founded Monad to solve this security data challenge and liberate customers’ security data from siloed tools to make it accessible via any data warehouse of choice.”

The startup’s Series A funding round, which was also backed by Sequoia Capital, brings its total amount of investment raised to  $19 million and comes 12 months after its Sequoia-led seed round. The funds will enable Monad to scale its development efforts for its security data cloud platform, the startup said.

Monad was founded in May 2020 by security veterans Christian Almenar and Jacolon Walker. Almenar previously co-founded serverless security startup Intrinsic which was acquired by VMware in 2019, while Walker served as CISO and security engineer at OpenDoor, Collective Health, and Palantir.

Serverless Stack raises $1M for open-source application framework

Open-source framework startup Serverless Stack announced Friday that it raised $1 million in seed funding from a group of investors that includes Greylock Partners, SV Angel and Y Combinator.

The company was founded in 2017 by Jay V and Frank Wang in San Francisco, and they were part of Y Combinator’s 2021 winter batch.

Serverless Stack’s technology enables engineers to more easily build full-stack serverless apps. CEO V said he and Wang were working in this space for years with the aim of exposing it to a broader group of people.

While tooling around in the space, they determined that the ability to build serverless apps was not getting better, so they joined Y Combinator to hone their idea on how to make the process easier.

Here’s how the technology works: The open-source framework allows developers to test and make changes to their applications by directly connecting their local machines to the cloud. The problem with what V called an “old-school process” is that developers would upload their apps to the cloud, wait for it to run and then make any changes. Instead, Serverless Stack connects directly to the cloud for the ability to debug applications locally, he added.

Since its launch six months ago, Serverless Stack has grown to over 2,000 stars on GitHub and was downloaded more than 60,000 times.

Dalton Caldwell, managing director of YC, met V and Wang at the cohort and said he was “super impressed” because the pair were working in the space for a long time.

“These folks are experts — there are probably just half a dozen people who know as much as they do, as there aren’t that many people working on this technology,” Caldwell told TechCrunch. “The proof is in the pudding, and if they can get people to adopt it, like they did on GitHub so far, and keep that community engagement, that is my strongest signal of staying power.”

V has earmarked the new funding to expand the team, including hiring engineers to support new use cases.

Serverless initially gravitated toward specific use cases — APIs are now allowing its community to chime in and it is using that as a guide, V said. It recently announced more of a full-stack use case for building out APIs with a database and also building out the front end frameworks.

Ultimately, V’s roadmap includes building out more tools with a vision of getting Serverless Stack to the point where a developer can come on with an idea and take it all the way to an IPO using his platform.

“That’s why we want the community to drive the roadmap,” V told TechCrunch. “We are focused on what they are building and when they are in production, how they are managing it. Eventually, we will build out a dashboard to make it easier for them to manage all of their applications.”

 

WebOps platform Pantheon raises $100M from SoftBank Vision Fund

WebOps SaaS platform Pantheon, which started out as a Drupal and WordPress hosting service many years ago, today announced that it has raised a $100 million Series E round solely funded by the Softbank Vision Fund. With this round, Pantheon has now reached unicorn status, with a valuation of over $1 billion.

Pantheon co-founder and CEO Zack Rosen told me that the company wasn’t under any pressure to raise. “It really just helps us accelerate everything that we’re doing,” he said. “We didn’t need the funding. We had plenty of cash in the bank. We were planning to raise in a year or two years down the road. But we have a lot of conviction in and where this industry is going and our customers’ needs are pretty apparent, so we just used this as an opportunity to pull things in by six months to a year and accelerate all the things that were already on our operational plans for the company.”

Image Credits: Pantheon

As Rosen noted, the role of company websites has changed quite a bit since Pantheon launched almost a dozen years ago. While originally, they were mostly about brand building and having a publishing channel, these days, they are directly tied to revenue. “The majority of buying decisions get made before anyone talks to a customer these days,” Rosen said. “All the research is getting done — hopefully — on your company’s website. Any link in an advertisement or link in an email is going to route that customer back to the website. That’s your most important digital product. And so marketers are really starting to think about it like that.”

So while hosting and publishing may be solved problems, driving revenue through a company’s website — and measuring that — is where Pantheon sees a lot of opportunities going forward. Though at the core of the company’s offering, of course, is still its serverless hosting platform and developers remain its core audience. But it’s the collaboration between the marketing teams and developers that is driving a lot of what the company is now investing in. “In order to deliver a best-in-class digital experience — and be able to iterate it every single day and work with designers and developers and website owners and project managers — you need a system of record for that work. You need a solid workflow for those teams,” Rosen noted.

Companies, he argues, are looking for a solid SaaS platform that provides them with those workflows, in addition to the high-performance hosting, CDNs and everything else that is now table stakes for hosting websites. “[Teams] want to stop thinking about this stuff,” he said. “They just want a partner — like any other SaaS application, whether it’s Stripe, Twilio or Salesforce. They just want it to work and not to worry about it. And then, once you have that taken care of, then you can move up into the things that really drive the outcomes these teams care about.”

As for raising from the SoftBank Vision Fund, which features the likes of ByteDance, Perch, Redis Labs, Slack and Arm among its investments (and, infamously, WeWork), Rosen said that Pantheon had its choice of firms, but at the end of the day, SoftBank’s team turned out to be “huge believers in this category,” he said, and could help Pantheon reach the scale it needs to define the WebOps category.

“Digital transformation has accelerated the movement to the cloud for essential business infrastructure. By automating workflows and do-it-yourself with its SaaS offering, we believe Pantheon’s leading platform is transforming how modern website experiences are created,” said Vikas Parekh, Partner at SoftBank Investment Advisers. “We are excited to partner with Zack and the Pantheon team to support their ambition of helping organizations embrace a new and better way of building websites that deliver results.”

PlanetScale raises $30M Series B for its database service

PlanetScale, the company behind the open-source Vitess database clustering system for MySQL that was first developed at YouTube, today announced that it has raised a $30 million Series B funding round led by Insight Partners, with participation from a16z and SignalFire. With this, the company has now raised a total of $55 million, according to Crunchbase.

Today’s announcement comes only a few weeks after PlanetScale launched its new hosted database platform, also dubbed PlanetScale. The company had previously offered a hosted version of Vitess, but with this new service, it is going a step further and offering what it calls a “developer-first database” that abstracts away all of the infrastructures to ensure that developers won’t have to think about cloud zones, cluster sizes and other details.

Indeed, PlanetScale CEO and co-founder Jiten Vaidya was quite open about the limitations of this earlier product. “What we had built last year was pretty much hosted Vitess, which was no different than how a lot of cloud providers today give you databases,” he said. “So none of this ease of use, none of this elegance, none of these state-of-the-art experiences that the developers want and expect today, we had built into our product.”

But a few months ago, the company brought on former GitHub VP of Engineering Sam Lambert as its Chief Product Officer. Vaidya noted that Lambert brought a lot of developer empathy to PlanetScale and helped it launch this new product.

“People come to you because they’re not database experts, but they have data, they have problems,” Lambert said. “And too many companies, especially in the database world, do not think about the daily lives of their users like we do. They don’t think about the complete journey of what the user is actually trying to do, which is to provide value to their customers. They’re just very impressed with themselves for storing and retrieving data. And it’s like, yep, we’ve been doing that. We’ve been doing that since the 60s. Can we do something else now?”

The company’s users today include the likes of Slack, Figma, GitHub and Square, so it’s clearly delivering value to a lot of users. As Lambert noted, PlanetScale aims to offer them a product that is simple and easy to use. “Just because it is simple and easy to use, and beautiful, honestly — like just beautiful, well-designed tooling — it doesn’t mean it’s inferior. It doesn’t mean it’s missing anything. It means the others are missing the poetry and the additional elements of beauty that you can add to infrastructure products,” he said.

PlanetScale plans to use the new funding to scale its team globally and accelerate the adoption of its platform. Insight Partners Managing Director Nikhil Sachdev will join the company’s board, with the firm’s Managing Director Praveen Akkiraju also joining as a board observer.

“PlanetScale is setting a new bar for simplicity, performance and scalability for cloud-based databases in the serverless era,” said Sachdev. “The developer experience for databases has been painful for too long. PlanetScale is breaking that chain, solving longstanding problems related to scalability and reliability in an extremely elegant, tasteful, and useful way.”

Vercel raises $102M Series C for its front-end development platform

Vercel, the company behind the popular open-source Next.js React framework, today announced that it has raised a $102 million Series C funding round led by Bedrock Capital. Existing investors Accel, CRV,
Geodesic Capital, Greenoaks Capital and GV also participated in this round, together with new investors 8VC, Flex Capital, GGV, Latacora, Salesforce Ventures and Tiger Global. In total, the company has now raised $163 million and its current valuation is $1.1 billion.

As Vercel notes, the company saw strong growth in recent months, with traffic to all sites and apps on its network doubling since October 2020. About half of the world’s largest 10,000 websites now use Next.js . Given the open-source nature of the Next.js framework, not all of these users are obviously Vercel customers, but its current paying customers include the likes of Carhartt, Github, IBM, McDonald’s and Uber.

Image Credits: Vercel

“For us, it all starts with a front-end developer,” Vercel CEO Guillermo Rauch told me. “Our goal is to create and empower those developers — and their teams — to create delightful, immersive web experiences for their customers.”

With Vercel, Rauch and his team took the Next.js framework and then built a serverless platform that specifically caters to this framework and allows developers to focus on building their front ends without having to worry about scaling and performance.

Older solutions, Rauch argues, were built in isolation from the cloud platforms and serverless technologies, leaving it up to the developers to deploy and scale their solutions. And while some potential users may also be content with using a headless content management system, Rauch argues that increasingly, developers need to be able to build solutions that can go deeper than the off-the-shelf solutions that many businesses use today.

Rauch also noted that developers really like Vercel’s ability to generate a preview URL for a site’s front end every time a developer edits the code. “So instead of just spending all your time in code review, we’re shifting the equation to spending your time reviewing or experiencing your front end. That makes the experience a lot more collaborative,” he said. “So now, designers, marketers, IT, CEOs […] can now come together in this collaboration of building a front end and say, ‘that shade of blue is not the right shade of blue.'”

“Vercel is leading a market transition through which we are seeing the majority of value-add in web and cloud application development being delivered at the front end, closest to the user, where true experiences are made and enjoyed,” said Geoff Lewis, founder and managing partner at Bedrock. “We are extremely enthusiastic to work closely with Guillermo and the peerless team he has assembled to drive this revolution forward and are very pleased to have been able to co-lead this round.”

Edge computing startup Macrometa gets $20M Series A led by Pelion Venture Partners

Macrometa, the edge computing cloud and global data network for app developers, announced today it has raised a $20 million Series A. The round was led by Pelion Venture Partners, with participation from returning investors DNX Ventures (the Japan and US-focused enterprise fund that led Macrometa’s seed round), Benhamou Global Ventures (BGV), Partech Partners, Fusion Fund, Sway Ventures and Shasta Ventures.

The startup, which is headquartered in Palo Alto with operations in Bulgaria and India, plans to use its Series A on feature development, acquiring more enterprise customers and integrating with content delivery networks (CDN), cloud and telecom providers. It will hire for its engineering and product development centers in the United States, Eastern Europe and India, and add new centers in Ukraine, Portugal, Greece, Mexico and Argentina.

The company’s last round of funding, an $7 million seed, was announced just eight months ago. Its Series A brings Macrometa’s total raised since its was founded in 2017 to $29 million.

As part of the new round, Macrometa expanded its board of directors, adding Pelion general partner Chris Cooper as a director, and Pelion senior associate Zain Rizavi and DNX Ventures principal Eva Nahari as board observers.

Macrometa’s global data network combines a globally distributed noSQL database and a low-latency stream data processing engine, enabling web and cloud develops to run and scale data-heavy, real-time cloud applications. The network allows developers to run apps concurrently across its 175 points of presence (PoPs), or edge regions, around the world, depending on which one is closest to an end user. Macrometa claims that the mean roundtrip time (RTT) for users on laptops or phones to its edge cloud and back is less than 50 milliseconds globally, or 50x to 100x faster than cloud platforms like DyanmoDB, MongoDB or Firebase.

A photo of Macrometa co-founder and CEO Chetan Venkatesh

Macrometa co-founder and CEO Chetan Venkatesh

Since its seed round last year, the company has accelerated its customer acquisition, especially among large global enterprises and web scale players, co-founder and chief executive officer Chetan Venkatesh told TechCrunch. Macrometa also made its self-service platform available to developers, who can try its serverless database, pub/sug, event processing and stateful compute runtime for free.

Macrometa recently became one of two distributed data companies (the other one is Fauna) partnered with Cloudflare for developers building new apps on Workers, its serverless application platform. Venkatesh said the combination of Macrometa and Cloudflare Workers enables data-driven APIs and web services to be 50x to 100x faster in performance and lower latency compared to the public cloud.

 

The COVID-19 pandemic accelerated Macrometa’s business significantly, said Venkatesh, because its enterprise and web scale customers needed to handle the unpredictable data traffic patterns created by remote work. The pandemic also “resulted in several secular and permanent shifts in cloud adoption and consumption,” he added, changing how people shop, consume media, content and entertainment. That has “exponentially increased the need for handling dynamic bursts of demands for application infrastructure securely,” he said.

One example of how enterprise clients use Macrometa is e-commerce providers who implemented its infrastructure with their existing CDN and cloud backends to provide more data and AI-based personalization for shoppers, including real-time recommendations, regionalized search at the edge and local data geo-fencing to comply with data and privacy regulations.

Some of Macrometa’s SaaS clients use its global data network as a global data cache for handling surges in usage and keep regional copies of data and API results across its regional data centers. Venkatesh added that several large telecom operators have used Macrometa’s data stream ingestion and complex event processing platform to replace legacy data ingest platforms like Splunk, Tibco and Apache Kafka.

In a statement, Pelion Venture Partners, general partner Chris Cooper said, “We believe the next phase of computing will be focused on the edge, ultimately bringing cloud-based workloads closer to the end user. As more and more workloads move away from a centralized cloud model, Macrometa is becoming the de facto edge provider to run data-heavy and compute-intensive workloads for developers and enterprises alike, globally.”

Google Cloud Run gets committed use discounts and new security features

Cloud Run, Google Cloud’s serverless platform for containerized applications, is getting committed use discounts. Users who commit to spending a given amount on using Cloud Run for a year will get a 17% discount on the money they commit. The company offers a similar pre-commitment discount scheme for VM-based Compute Engine instances, as well as automatic ‘sustained use‘ discounts for machines that run for more than 25% of a month.

In addition, Google Cloud is also introducing a number of new security features for Cloud Run, including the ability to mount secrets from the Google Cloud Secret Manager and binary authorization to help define and enforce policies about how containers are deployed on the service. Cloud Run users can now also now use and manage their own encryption keys (by default, Cloud Run uses Google-managed keys) and a new Recommendation Hub inside of Cloud Run will now offer users recommendations for how to better protect their Cloud Run services.

Aparna Sinha, who recently became the director of product management for Google Cloud’s serverless platform, noted that these updates are part of Google Cloud’s push to build what she calls the “next generation of serverless.’

“We’re really excited to introduce our new vision for serverless, which I think is going to help redefine this space,” she told me. “In the past, serverless has meant a certain narrower type of compute, which is focused on functions or a very specific kind of applications, web services, etc. — and what we are talking about with redefining serverless is focusing on the power of serverless, which is the developer experience and the ease of use, but broadening it into a much more versatile platform, where many different types of applications can be run, and building in the Google way of doing DevOps and security and a lot of integrations so that you have access to everything that’s the best of cloud.”

She noted that Cloud Run saw “tremendous adoption” during the pandemic, something she attributes to the fact that businesses were looking to speed up time-to-value from their applications. IKEA, for example, which famously had a hard time moving from in-store to online sales, bet on Google Cloud’s serverless platform to bring down the refresh time of its online store and inventory management system from three hours to less than three minutes after switching to this model.

“That’s kind of the power of serverless, I think, especially looking forward, the ability to build real-time applications that have data about the context, about the inventory, about the customer and can therefore be much more reactive and responsive,” Sinha said. “This is an expectation that customers will have going forward and serverless is an excellent way to deliver that as well as be responsive to demand patterns, especially when they’re changing so much in today’s uncertain environment.”

Since the container model gives businesses a lot of flexibility in what they want to run in these containers — and how they want to develop these applications since Cloud Run is language-agnostic — Google is now seeing a lot of other enterprises move to this platform as well, both for deploying completely new applications but also to modernize some of their existing services.

For the companies that have predictable usage patterns, the committed use discounts should be an attractive option and it’s likely the more sophisticated organizations that are asking for the kinds of new security features that Google Cloud is introducing today.

“The next generation of serverless combines the best of serverless with containers to run a broad spectrum of apps, with no language, networking or regional restrictions,” Sinha writes in today’s announcement. “The next generation of serverless will help developers build the modern applications of tomorrow—applications that adapt easily to change, scale as needed, respond to the needs of their customers faster and more efficiently, all while giving developers the best developer experience.”

Aqua Security raises $135M at a $1B valuation for its cloud native security service

Aqua Security, a Boston- and Tel Aviv-based security startup that focuses squarely on securing cloud-native services, today announced that it has raised a $135 million Series E funding round at a $1 billion valuation. The round was led by ION Crossover Partners. Existing investors M12 Ventures, Lightspeed Venture Partners, Insight Partners, TLV Partners, Greenspring Associates and Acrew Capital also participated. In total, Aqua Security has now raised $265 million since it was founded in 2015.

The company was one of the earliest to focus on securing container deployments. And while many of its competitors were acquired over the years, Aqua remains independent and is now likely on a path to an IPO. When it launched, the industry focus was still very much on Docker and Docker containers. To the detriment of Docker, that quickly shifted to Kubernetes, which is now the de facto standard. But enterprises are also now looking at serverless and other new technologies on top of this new stack.

“Enterprises that five years ago were experimenting with different types of technologies are now facing a completely different technology stack, a completely different ecosystem and a completely new set of security requirements,” Aqua CEO Dror Davidoff told me. And with these new security requirements came a plethora of startups, all focusing on specific parts of the stack.

Image Credits: Aqua Security

What set Aqua apart, Dror argues, is that it managed to 1) become the best solution for container security and 2) realized that to succeed in the long run, it had to become a platform that would secure the entire cloud-native environment. About two years ago, the company made this switch from a product to a platform, as Davidoff describes it.

“There was a spree of acquisitions by CheckPoint and Palo Alto [Networks] and Trend [Micro],” Davidoff said. “They all started to acquire pieces and tried to build a more complete offering. The big advantage for Aqua was that we had everything natively built on one platform. […] Five years later, everyone is talking about cloud-native security. No one says ‘container security’ or ‘serverless security’ anymore. And Aqua is practically the broadest cloud-native security [platform].”

One interesting aspect of Aqua’s strategy is that it continues to bet on open source, too. Trivy, its open-source vulnerability scanner, is the default scanner for GitLab’s Harbor Registry and the CNCF’s Artifact Hub, for example.

“We are probably the best security open-source player there is because not only do we secure from vulnerable open source, we are also very active in the open-source community,” Davidoff said (with maybe a bit of hyperbole). “We provide tools to the community that are open source. To keep evolving, we have a whole open-source team. It’s part of the philosophy here that we want to be part of the community and it really helps us to understand it better and provide the right tools.”

In 2020, Aqua, which mostly focuses on mid-size and larger companies, doubled the number of paying customers and it now has more than half a dozen customers with an ARR of over $1 million each.

Davidoff tells me the company wasn’t actively looking for new funding. Its last funding round came together only a year ago, after all. But the team decided that it wanted to be able to double down on its current strategy and raise sooner than originally planned. ION had been interested in working with Aqua for a while, Davidoff told me, and while the company received other offers, the team decided to go ahead with ION as the lead investor (with all of Aqua’s existing investors also participating in this round).

“We want to grow from a product perspective, we want to grow from a go-to-market [perspective] and expand our geographical coverage — and we also want to be a little more acquisitive. That’s another direction we’re looking at because now we have the platform that allows us to do that. […] I feel we can take the company to great heights. That’s the plan. The market opportunity allows us to dream big.”

 

Project management service ZenHub raises $4.7M

ZenHub, the GitHub-centric project management service for development teams, today announced that it has raised a $4.7 million seed funding round from Canada’s BDC Capital and Ripple Ventures. This marks the first fundraise for the Vancouver, Canada-based startup after the team bootstrapped the service, which first launched back in 2014. Additional angel investors in this round include Adam Gross (former CEO of Heroku), Jiaona Zhang (VP Product at Webflow) and Oji Udezue (VP Product at Calendly).

In addition to announcing this funding round, the team also today launched its newest automation feature, which makes it easier for teams to plan the development sprints, something that is core to the Agile development process but often takes a lot of time and energy — something teams are better off spending on the actual development process.

“This is a really exciting kind of pivot point for us as a business and gives us a lot of ammunition, I think, to really go after our vision and mission a little bit more aggressively than we have even in the past,” ZenHub co-founder and CEO Aaron Upright told me. The team, he explained, used the beginning of the pandemic to spend a lot of time with customers to better understand how they were reacting to what was happening. In the process, customers repeatedly noted that development resources were getting increasingly expensive and that teams were being stretched even farther and under a lot of pressure.

ZenHub’s answer to this was to look into how it could automate more of the processes that constitute the most complex parts of Agile. Earlier this year, the company launched its first efforts in this area, with new tools for improving developer handoffs in GitHub and now, with the help of this new funding, it is putting the next pieces in place by helping teams automate their sprint planning.

Image Credits: ZenHub

“We thought about automation as an answer to [the problems development teams were facing] and that we could take an approach to automation and to help guide teams through some of the most complex and time-consuming parts of the Agile process,” Upright said. “We raised money so that we can really accelerate toward that vision. As a self-funded company, we could have gone down that path, albeit a little bit slower. But the opportunity that we saw in the market — really brought about by the pandemic, and teams working more remotely and this pressure to produce — we wanted to provide a solution much, much faster.”

The spring planning feature itself is actually pretty straightforward and allows project managers to allocate a certain number of story points (a core Agile metric to estimate the complexity of a given action item) to each sprint. ZenHub’s tool can then use that to automatically generate a list of the most highly prioritized items for the next sprint. Optionally, teams can also decide to roll over items that they didn’t finish during a given sprint into the next one.

Image Credits: ZenHub

With that, ZenHub Sprints can automate a lot of the standard sprint meetings and lets teams focus on thinking about the overall process. Of course, teams can always overrule the automated systems.

“There’s nothing more that developers hate than sitting around the table for eight hours, planning sprints, when really they all just want to be working on stuff,” Upright said.

With this new feature, sprints become a core feature of the ZenHub experience. Typically, project managers worked around this by assigning milestones in GitHub, but having a dedicated tool and these new automation features will make this quite a bit easier.

Coming soon, ZenHub will also build a new feature that will automate some parts of the software estimation process, too, by launching a new tool that will help teams more easily allocate story points to routing action items so that their discussions can focus on the more contentious ones.

Microsoft’s Dapr open-source project to help developers build cloud-native apps hits 1.0

Dapr, the Microsoft-incubated open-source project that aims to make it easier for developers to build event-driven, distributed cloud-native applications, hit its 1.0 milestone today, signifying the project’s readiness for production use cases. Microsoft launched the Distributed Application Runtime (that’s what “Dapr” stand for) back in October 2019. Since then, the project released 14 updates and the community launched integrations with virtually all major cloud providers, including Azure, AWS, Alibaba and Google Cloud.

The goal for Dapr, Microsoft Azure CTO Mark Russinovich told me, was to democratize cloud-native development for enterprise developers.

“When we go look at what enterprise developers are being asked to do — they’ve traditionally been doing client, server, web plus database-type applications,” he noted. “But now, we’re asking them to containerize and to create microservices that scale out and have no-downtime updates — and they’ve got to integrate with all these cloud services. And many enterprises are, on top of that, asking them to make apps that are portable across on-premises environments as well as cloud environments or even be able to move between clouds. So just tons of complexity has been thrown at them that’s not specific to or not relevant to the business problems they’re trying to solve.”

And a lot of the development involves re-inventing the wheel to make their applications reliably talk to various other services. The idea behind Dapr is to give developers a single runtime that, out of the box, provides the tools that developers need to build event-driven microservices. Among other things, Dapr provides various building blocks for things like service-to-service communications, state management, pub/sub and secrets management.

Image Credits: Dapr

“The goal with Dapr was: let’s take care of all of the mundane work of writing one of these cloud-native distributed, highly available, scalable, secure cloud services, away from the developers so they can focus on their code. And actually, we took lessons from serverless, from Functions-as-a-Service where with, for example Azure Functions, it’s event-driven, they focus on their business logic and then things like the bindings that come with Azure Functions take care of connecting with other services,” Russinovich said.

He also noted that another goal here was to do away with language-specific models and to create a programming model that can be leveraged from any language. Enterprises, after all, tend to use multiple languages in their existing code, and a lot of them are now looking at how to best modernize their existing applications — without throwing out all of their current code.

As Russinovich noted, the project now has more than 700 contributors outside of Microsoft (though the core commuters are largely from Microsoft) and a number of businesses started using it in production before the 1.0 release. One of the larger cloud providers that is already using it is Alibaba. “Alibaba Cloud has really fallen in love with Dapr and is leveraging it heavily,” he said. Other organizations that have contributed to Dapr include HashiCorp and early users like ZEISS, Ignition Group and New Relic.

And while it may seem a bit odd for a cloud provider to be happy that its competitors are using its innovations already, Russinovich noted that this was exactly the plan and that the team hopes to bring Dapr into a foundation soon.

“We’ve been on a path to open governance for several months and the goal is to get this into a foundation. […] The goal is opening this up. It’s not a Microsoft thing. It’s an industry thing,” he said — but he wasn’t quite ready to say to which foundation the team is talking.