Tag: serverless computing

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Supabase raises $6M for its open-source Firebase alternative

Supabase, a YC-incubated startup that offers developers an open-source alternative to Google’s Firebase and similar platforms, today announced that it has raised a $6 million funding round led by Coatue, with participation from YC, Mozilla and a group of about 20 angel investors.

Currently, Supabase includes support for PostgreSQL databases and authentication tools, with a storage and serverless solution coming soon. It currently provides all the usual tools for working with databases — and listening to database changes — as well as a web-based UI for managing them. The team is quick to note that while the comparison with Google’s Firebase is inevitable, it is not meant to be a 1-to-1 replacement for it. And unlike Firebase, which uses a NoSQL database, Supabase is using PostgreSQL.

Indeed, the team relies heavily on existing open-source projects and contributes to them where it can. One of Supabase’s full-time employees maintains the PostgREST tool for building APIs on top of the database, for example.

“We’re not trying to build another system,” Supabase co-founder and CEO Paul Copplestone told me. “We just believe that already there are well-trusted, scalable enterprise open-source products out there and they just don’t have this usability component. So actually right now, Supabase is an amalgamation of six tools, soon to be seven. Some of them we built ourselves. If we go to market and can’t find anything that we think is going to be scalable — or really solve the problems — then we’ll build it and we’ll open-source it. But otherwise, we’ll use existing tools.”

Image Credits: Supabase

The traditional route to market for open-source tools is to create a tool and then launch a hosted version — maybe with some additional features — to monetize the work. Supabase took a slightly different route and launched a hosted version right away.

If somebody would want to host the service themselves, the code is available, but running your own PaaS is obviously a major challenge, but that’s also why the team went with this approach. What you get with Firebase, he noted, is that it’s a few clicks to set everything up. Supabase wanted to be able to offer the same kind of experience. “That’s one thing that self-hosting just cannot offer,” he said. “You can’t really get the same wow factor that you can if we offered a hosted platform where you literally [have] one click and then a couple of minutes later, you’ve got everything set up.”

In addition, he also noted that he wanted to make sure the company could support the growing stable of tools it was building and commercializing its tools based on its database services was the easiest way to do so.

Like other Y Combinator startups, Supabase closed its funding round after the accelerator’s demo day in August. The team had considered doing a SAFE round, but it found the right group of institutional investors that offered founder-friendly terms to go ahead with this institutional round instead.

Why SAFE notes are not safe for entrepreneurs

“It’s going to cost us a lot to compete with the generous free tier that Firebase offers,” Copplestone said. “And it’s databases, right? So it’s not like you can just keep them stateless and shut them down if you’re not really using them. [This funding round] gives us a long, generous runway and more importantly, for the developers who come in and build on top of us, [they can] take as long as they want and then start monetizing later on themselves.“

The company plans to use the new funding to continue to invest in its various tools and hire to support its growth.

“Supabase’s value proposition of building in a weekend and scaling so quickly hit home immediately,” said Caryn Marooney, general partner at Coatue and Facebook’s former VP of Global Communications. “We are proud to work with this team, and we are excited by their laser focus on developers and their commitment to speed and reliability.”

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Dataloop raises $11M Series A round for its AI data management platform

Dataloop, a Tel Aviv-based startup that specializes in helping businesses manage the entire data lifecycle for their AI projects, including helping them annotate their datasets, today announced that it has now raised a total of $16 million. This includes a $5 seed round that was previously unreported, as well as an $11 million Series A round that recently closed.

The Series A round was led by Amiti Ventures with participation from F2 Venture Capital, crowdfunding platform OurCrowd, NextLeap Ventures and SeedIL Ventures.

“Many organizations continue to struggle with moving their AI and ML projects into production as a result of data labeling limitations and a lack of real time validation that can only be achieved with human input into the system,” said Dataloop CEO Eran Shlomo. “With this investment, we are committed, along with our partners, to overcoming these roadblocks and providing next generation data management tools that will transform the AI industry and meet the rising demand for innovation in global markets.”

Image Credits: Dataloop

For the most part, Dataloop specializes in helping businesses manage and annotate their visual data. It’s agnostic to the vertical its customers are in, but we’re talking about anything from robotics and drones to retail and autonomous driving.

The platform itself centers around the ‘humans in the loop’ model that complements the automated systems with the ability for humans to train and correct the model as needed. It combines the hosted annotation platform with a Python SDK and REST API for developers, as well as a serverless Functions-as-a-Service environment that runs on top of a Kubernetes cluster for automating dataflows.

Image Credits: Dataloop

The company was founded in 2017. It’ll use the new funding to grow its presence in the U.S. and European markets, something that’s pretty standard for Israeli startups, and build out its engineering team as well.

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Microsoft brings data services to its Arc multi-cloud management service

Microsoft today launched a major update to its Arc multi-cloud service that allows Azure customers to run and manage workloads across clouds — including those of Microsoft’s competitors — and their on on-premises data centers. First announced at Microsoft Ignite in 2019, Arc was always meant to not just help users manage their servers but to also allow them to run data services like Azure SQL and Azure Database for PostgreSQL close to where their data sits.

Today, the company is making good on this promise with the preview launch of Azure Arc enabled data services with support for, as expected, Azure SQL and Azure Database for PostgreSQL.

In addition, Microsoft is making the core feature of Arc, Arc enabled servers, generally available. These are the tools at the core of the service that allow enterprises can use the standard Azure Portal to manage and monitor their Windows and Linux servers across their multi-cloud and edge environments.

Image Credits: Microsoft

“We’ve always known that enterprises are looking to unlock the agility of the cloud — they love the app model, they love the business model — while balancing a need to maintain certain applications and workloads on premises,” Rohan Kumar, Microsoft’s corporate VP for Azure Data said. “A lot of customers actually have a multi-cloud strategy. In some cases, they need to keep the data specifically for regulatory compliance. And in many cases, they want to maximize their existing investments. They’ve spent a lot of CapEx.”

As Kumar stressed, Microsoft wants to meet customers where they are, without forcing them to adopt a container architecture, for example, or replace their specialized engineered appliances to use Arc.

“Hybrid is really [about] providing that flexible choice to our customers, meeting them where they are, and not prescribing a solution,” he said.

He admitted that this approach makes engineering the solution more difficult, but the team decided that the baseline should be a container endpoint and nothing more. And for the most part, Microsoft packaged up the tools its own engineers were already using to run Azure services on the company’s own infrastructure to manage these services in a multi-cloud environment.

“In hindsight, it was a little challenging at the beginning, because, you can imagine, when we initially built them, we didn’t imagine that we’ll be packaging them like this. But it’s a very modern design point,” Kumar said. But the result is that supporting customers is now relatively easy because it’s so similar to what the team does in Azure, too.

Kumar noted that one of the selling points for the Azure Data Services is also that the version of Azure SQL is essentially evergreen, allowing them to stop worrying about SQL Server licensing and end-of-life support questions.

You can now use Azure to manage resources anywhere, including on AWS and Google Cloud

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Google Cloud launches its Business Application Platform based on Apigee and AppSheet

Unlike some of its competitors, Google Cloud has recently started emphasizing how its large lineup of different services can be combined to solve common business problems. Instead of trying to sell individual services, Google is focusing on solutions and the latest effort here is what it calls its Business Application Platform, which combines the API management capabilities of Apigee with the no-code application development platform of AppSheet, which Google acquired earlier this year.

As part of this process, Google is also launching a number of new features for both services today. The company is launching the beta of a new API Gateway, built on top of the open-source Envoy project, for example. This is a fully-managed service that is meant o makes it easier for developers to secure and manage their API across Google’s cloud computing services and serverless offerings like Cloud Functions and Cloud Run. The new gateway, which has been in alpha for a while now, offers all the standard features you’d expect, including authentication, key validation and rate limiting.

As for its low-code service AppSheet, the Google Cloud team is now making it easier to bring in data from third-party applications thanks to the general availability to Apigee as a data source for the service. AppSheet already supported standard sources like MySQL, Salesforce and G Suite, but this new feature adds a lot of flexibility to the service.

With more data comes more complexity, so AppSheet is also launching new tools for automating processes inside the service today, thanks to the early access launch of AppSheet Automation. Like the rest of AppSheet, the promise here is that developers won’t have to write any code. Instead, AppSheet Automation provides a visual interface, that according to Google, “provides contextual suggestions based on natural language inputs.” 

“We are confident the new category of business application platforms will help empower both technical and line of business developers with the core ability to create and extend applications, build and automate workflows, and connect and modernize applications,” Google notes in today’s announcement. And indeed, this looks like a smart way to combine the no-code environment of AppSheet with the power of Apigee .

Google acquires AppSheet to bring no-code development to Google Cloud

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Cloudflare launches Workers Unbound, the next evolution of its serverless platform

Cloudflare today announced the private beta launch of Workers Unbound, the latest step in its efforts to offer a serverless platform that can compete with the likes of AWS Lambda.

The company first launched its Workers edge computing platform in late 2017. Today it has “hundreds of thousands of developers” who use it and in the last quarter alone, more than 20,000 developers built applications based on the service, according to the company. Cloudflare also uses Workers to power many of its own services, but the first iteration of the platform had quite a few limitations. The idea behind Workers Unbound is to do away with most of those and turn it into a platform that can compete with the likes of AWS, Microsoft and Google.

“The original motivation for us building Cloudflare Workers was not to sell it as a product but because we were using it as our own internal platform to build applications,” Cloudflare co-founder and CEO Matthew Prince told me ahead of today’s announcement. “Today, Cloudflare Teams, which is our fastest-growing product line, is all running on top of Cloudflare workers and it’s allowed us to innovate as fast as we have and stay nimble and stay agile and all those things that get harder as you as you become a larger and larger company.”

Cloudflare co-founder and CEO Matthew Prince

Prince noted that Cloudflare aims to expose all of the services it builds for its internal consumption to third-party developers as well. “The fact that we’ve been able to roll out a whole Zscaler competitor in almost no time is because of the fact that we had this platform and we could build on it ourselves,” he said.

The original Workers service will continue to operate (but under the Workers Bundled moniker) and essentially become Cloudflare’s serverless platform for basic workloads that only run for a very short time. Workers Unbound — as the name implies — is meant for more complex and longer-running processes.

When it first launched Workers, the company said that its killer feature was speed. Today, Prince argues that speed obviously remains an important feature — and Cloudflare Workers Unbound promises that it essentially does away with cold start latencies. But developers also adopted the platform because of its ability to scale and its price.

Indeed, Workers Unbound, Cloudflare argues, is now significantly more affordable than similar offerings. “For the same workload, Cloudflare Workers Unbound can be 75 percent less expensive than AWS Lambda, 24 percent less expensive than Microsoft Azure Functions, and 52 percent less expensive than Google Cloud Functions,” the company says in today’s press release.

As it turned out, the fact that Workers was also an edge computing platform was basically a bonus but not necessarily why developers adopted it.

Another feature Prince highlighted is regulatory compliance. “I think the thing we’re realizing as we talk to our largest enterprise customers is that for real companies — not just the individual developer hacking away at home — but for real businesses in financial services or anyone who has to deal with a regulated industry, the only thing that trumps ease of use is regulatory compliance, which is not sexy or interesting or anything else but like if your GC says you can’t use XYZ platform, then you don’t use XYZ platform and that’s the end of the story,” Prince noted.

Speed, though, is of course something developers will always care about. Prince stressed that the team was quite happy with the 5ms cold start times of the original Workers platform. “But we wanted to be better,” he said. “We wanted to be the clearly fastest serverless platform forever — and the only number that we know no one else can beat is zero — unless they invent a time machine.”

The way the team engineered this is by queuing up the process while the two servers are still negotiating their TLS handshake. “We’re excited to be the first cloud computing platform that [offers], for no additional costs, out of the box, zero millisecond cold start times which then also means less variability in the performance.”

Cloudflare also argues that developers can update their code and have it go live globally within 15 seconds.

Another area the team worked on was making it easier to use the service in general. Among the key new features here is support for languages like Python and a new SDK that will allow developers to add support for their favorite languages, too.

Prince credits Cloudflare’s ability to roll out this platform, which is obviously heavy on compute resources — and to keep it affordable — to the fact that it always thought of itself as a security platform first (the team has often said that the CDN functionality was more or less incidental). Because it performed deep packet inspection, for example, the company’s servers always featured relatively high-powered CPUs. “Our network has been optimized for CPU usage from the beginning and as a result, it’s actually made it much more natural for us to extend our network that way,” he explained. “To this day, the same machines that are running our firewall products are the same machines that are running our edge computing platform.”

Looking ahead, Prince noted that while Workers and Workers Unbound feature a distributed key-value store, the team is looking at adding a more robust database infrastructure and distributed storage.

The team is also looking at how to decompose applications to put them closest to where they will be running. “You could imagine that in the future, it might be that you write an application and we say, ‘listen, the parts of the application that are sensitive to the user of the database might run in Portland, where you are — but if the database is in Ashburn, Virginia, then the parts that are sensitive to latency in the database might run there,” he said.

 

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Vendia raises $5.1M for its multi-cloud serverless platform

When the inventor of AWS Lambda, Tim Wagner, and the former head of blockchain at AWS, Shruthi Rao, co-found a startup, it’s probably worth paying attention. Vendia, as the new venture is called, combines the best of serverless and blockchain to help build a truly multi-cloud serverless platform for better data and code sharing.

Today, the Vendia team announced that it has raised a $5.1 million seed funding round, led by Neotribe’s Swaroop ‘Kittu’ Kolluri. Correlation Ventures, WestWave Capital, HWVP, Firebolt Ventures, Floodgate and Future\Perfect Ventures also participated in this oversubscribed round.

(Image Credits: Vendia)

Seeing Wagner at the helm of a blockchain-centric startup isn’t exactly a surprise. After building Lambda at AWS, he spent some time as VP of engineering at Coinbase, where he left about a year ago to build Vendia.

“One day, Coinbase approached me and said, ‘hey, maybe we could do for the financial system what you’ve been doing over there for the cloud system,’ ” he told me. “And so I got interested in that. We had some conversations. I ended up going to Coinbase and spent a little over a year there as the VP of Engineering, helping them to set the stage for some of that platform work and tripling the size of the team.” He noted that Coinbase may be one of the few companies where distributed ledgers are actually mission-critical to their business, yet even Coinbase had a hard time scaling its Ethereum fleet, for example, and there was no cloud-based service available to help it do so.

Tim Wagner, Vendia co-founder and CEO (Image Credits: Vendia)

“The thing that came to me as I was working there was why don’t we bring these two things together? Nobody’s thinking about how would you build a distributed ledger or blockchain as if it were a cloud service, with all the things that we’ve learned over the course of the last 10 years building out the public cloud and learning how to do it at scale,” he said.

Wagner then joined forces with Rao, who spent a lot of time in her role at AWS talking to blockchain customers. One thing she noticed was that while it makes a lot of sense to use blockchain to establish trust in a public setting, that’s really not an issue for enterprise.

“After the 500th customers, it started to make sense,” she said. “These customers had made quite a bit of investment in IoT and edge devices. And they were gathering massive amounts of data. And they also made investments on the other side, with AI and ML and analytics. And they said, ‘well, there’s a lot of data and I want to push all of this data through these intelligent systems. And I need a mechanism to get this data.’ ” But the majority of that data often comes from third-party services. At the same time, most blockchain proof of concepts weren’t moving into any real production usage because the process was often far too complex, especially enterprises that maybe wanted to connect their systems to those of their partners.

Shruthi Rao, Vendia co-founder and CBO (Image Credits: Vendia)

“We are asking these partners to spin up Kubernetes clusters and install blockchain nodes. Why is that? That’s because for blockchain to bring trust into a system to ensure trust, you have to own your own data. And to own your own data, you need your own node. So we’re solving fundamentally the wrong problem,” she explained.

The first product Vendia is bringing to market is Vendia Share, a way for businesses to share data with partners (and across clouds) in real time, all without giving up control over that data. As Wagner noted, businesses often want to share large data sets but they also want to ensure they can control who has access to that data. For those users, Vendia is essentially a virtual data lake with provenance tracking and tamper-proofing built-in.

The company, which mostly raised this round after the coronavirus pandemic took hold in the U.S., is already working with a couple of design partners in multiple industries to test out its ideas, and plans to use the new funding to expand its engineering team to build out its tools.

“At Neotribe Ventures, we invest in breakthrough technologies that stretch the imagination and partner with companies that have category creation potential built upon a deep-tech platform,” said Neotribe founder and managing director Kolluri. “When we heard the Vendia story, it was a no-brainer for us. The size of the market for multi-party, multi-cloud data and code aggregation is enormous and only grows larger as companies capture every last bit of data. Vendia’s Serverless -based technology offers benefits such as ease of experimentation, no operational heavy lifting and a pay-as-you-go pricing model, making it both very consumable and highly disruptive. Given both Tim and Shruthi’s backgrounds, we know we’ve found an ideal ‘Founder fit’ to solve this problem! We are very excited to be the lead investors and be a part of their journey.”

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4 enterprise developer trends that will shape 2021

Ethan Batraski Contributor
Ethan Batraski is a partner at Venrock, where he invests across sectors with a particular focus on hard engineering problems such as developer infrastructure, advanced computing and space.

Technology has dramatically changed over the last decade, and so has how we build and deliver enterprise software.

Ten years ago, “modern computing” was to rely on teams of network admins managing data centers, running one application per server, deploying monolithic services, through waterfall, manual releases managed by QA and release managers.

Today, we have multi and hybrid clouds, serverless services, in continuous integration, running infrastructure-as-code.

SaaS has grown from a nascent 2% of the $450B enterprise software market in 2009, to 23% in 2020 and crossed $100B in revenue. PaaS and IaaS revenue represent another $50B in revenue, expecting to double to $100B by 2022.

With 77% of the enterprise software market — over $350B in annual revenue — still on legacy and on-premise systems, modern SaaS, PaaS and IaaS eating at the legacy market alone can grow the market 3x-4x over the next decade.

As the shift to cloud accelerates across the platform and infrastructure layers, here are four trends starting to emerge that will change how we develop and deliver enterprise software for the next decade.

1. The move to “everything as code”

Companies are building more dynamic, multiplatform, complex infrastructures than ever. We see the “-aaS” of the application, data, runtime and virtualization layers. Modern architectures are forcing extensibility to work with any number of mixed and matched services.

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Pulumi brings support for more languages to its infrastructure-as-code platform

Seattle-based Pulumi has quickly made a name for itself as a modern platform that lets developers specify their infrastructure through writing code in their preferred programming language — and not YAML. With the launch of Pulumi 2.0, those languages now include JavaScript, TypeScript, Go and .NET, in addition to its original support for Python. It’s also now extending its reach beyond its core infrastructure features to include deeper support for policy enforcement, testing and more.

As the company also today announced, it now has over 10,000 users and more than 100 paying customers. With that, it’s seeing a 10x increase in its year-over-year annual run rate, though without knowing the exact numbers, it’s obviously hard to know what exactly to make of that number. Current customers include the likes of Cockroach Labs, Mercedes-Benz and Tableau .

When the company first launched, its messaging was very much around containers and serverless. But as Pulumi founder and CEO Joe Duffy told me, today the company is often directly engaging with infrastructure teams that are building the platforms for the engineers in their respective companies.

As for Pulumi 2.0, Duffy says that “this is really taking the original Pulumi vision of infrastructure as code — using your favorite language — and augmenting it with what we’re calling superpowers.” That includes expanding the product’s overall capabilities from infrastructure provisioning to the adjacent problem spaces. That includes continuous delivery, but also policy-as-code. This extends the original Pulumi vision beyond just infrastructure but now also lets developers encapsulate their various infrastructure policies as code, as well.

Another area is testing. Because Pulumi allows developers to use “real” programming languages, they can also use the same testing techniques they are used to from the application development world to test the code they use to build their underlying infrastructure and catch mistakes before they go into production. And with all of that, developers can also use all of the usual tools they use to write code for defining the infrastructure that this code will then run on.

“The underlying philosophy is taking our heritage of using the best of what we know and love about programming languages — and really applying that to the entire spectrum of challenges people face when it comes to cloud infrastructure, from development to infrastructure teams to security engineers, really helping the entire organization be more productive working together,” said Duffy. “I think that’s the key: moving from infrastructure provisioning to something that works for the whole organization.”

Duffy also highlighted that many of the company’s larger enterprise users are relying on Pulumi to encode their own internal architectures as code and then roll them out across the company.

“We still embrace what makes each of the clouds special. AWS, Azure, Google Cloud and Kubernetes,” Duffy said. “We’re not trying to be a PaaS that abstracts over all. We’re just helping to be the consistent workflow across the entire team to help people adopt the modern approaches.”

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AWS launches discounted spot capacity for its Fargate container platform

AWS today quietly brought spot capacity to Fargate, its serverless compute engine for containers that supports both the company’s Elastic Container Service and, now, its Elastic Kubernetes service.

Like spot instances for the EC2 compute platform, Fargate Spot pricing is significantly cheaper, both for storage and compute, than regular Fargate pricing. In return, though, you have to be able to accept the fact that your instance may get terminated when AWS needs additional capacity. While that means Fargate Spot may not be perfect for every workload, there are plenty of applications that can easily handle an interruption.

“Fargate now has on-demand, savings plan, spot,” AWS VP of Compute Services Deepak Singh told me. “If you think about Fargate as a compute layer for, as we call it, serverless compute for containers, you now have the pricing worked out and you now have both orchestrators on top of it.”

He also noted that containers already drive a significant percentage of spot usage on AWS in general, so adding this functionality to Fargate makes a lot of sense (and may save users a few dollars here and there). Pricing, of course, is the major draw here and an hour of CPU time on Fargate Spot will only cost $0.01245364 (yes, AWS is pretty precise there) compared to $0.04048 for the on-demand price,

With this, AWS is also launching another important new feature: capacity providers. The idea here is to automate capacity provisioning for Fargate and EC2, both of which now offer on-demand and spot instances, after all. You simply write a config file that, for example, says you want to run 70 percent of your capacity on EC2 and the rest on spot instances. The scheduler will then keep that capacity on spot as instances come and go, and if there are no spot instances available, it will move it to on-demand instances and back to spot once instances are available again.

In the future, you will also be able to mix and match EC2 and Fargate. “You can say, I want some of my services running on EC2 on demand, some running on Fargate on demand, and the rest running on Fargate Spot,” Singh explained. “And the scheduler manages it for you. You squint hard, capacity is capacity. We can attach other capacity providers.” Outpost, AWS’ fully managed service for running AWS services in your data center, could be a capacity provider, for example.

These new features and prices will be officially announced in Thursday’s re:Invent keynote, but the documentation and pricing is already live today.

AWS announces EKS on Fargate is available

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AWS launches managed Cassandra services

Today at Amazon re:Invent, Amazon announced a new ability to manage Cassandra databases on AWS.

Already used by companies as diverse as Grubhub.com, Netflix, Ooyala, Openwave, Reddit, and Uber, to manage distributed NoSQL databases, that handle large amounts of data across commodity servers,  the new Amazon Managed Apache Cassandra Service, is AWS’ attempt to offer Cassandra directly instead of through third party vendors.

The Amazon MCS is serverless so users pay for the resources they use and it can automatically scale up and down in response to application traffic, the company says. It enables the development of applications that can serve thousands of requests per second with unlimited throughput and storage (something that can be incredibly attractive for IOT customers).

With the new services, developers can run Cassandra workloads on AWS using the same application code and developer tools they’re already using. Application updates just require changing the endpoint to the one in the Amazon MCS service table, the company said.

The data is also encrypted at rest by default using encryption keys that are stored in AWS Key Management Service (KMS). And Amazon MCS is also integrated with AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) to help developers manage and access table data, the company said.

Amazon also said it would work with the Cassandra API libraries and contribute to bug fixes to the open source Apache Cassandra project. AWS is charging for on-demand capacity during the preview and at general availability the company will make provisioned throughput available for more predictable workloads.

For now, the product is a part of Amazon’s free tier and for the first three months companies can receive a free tier of 30 million write request units, 30 million read request units and one gig of storage.