Kubernetes Founders Have Ambitious Plans for Heptio Startup
Two founders of the Kubernetes project at Google, Craig McLuckie and Joe Beda, recently announced their new company, Heptio. The company has raised an $8.5M series A investment round led by Accel, with participation from Madrona Venture Group. Heptio will bring Kubernetes to enterprises in order to accelerate software development, increase infrastructure efficiency and reduce the complexity of managing software at scale.
Beda became an entrepreneur-in-residence at Accel Partners in late 2015, and it looks like this startup will have solid funding and lots of experience to work with. The company's concept is that Kubernetes can significantly reduce infrastructure costs and simplify operations at many businesses, but it is too hard to get up and running with the platform.
Accordin to Heptio:
"The open source Kubernetes project brings Google’s extensive experience managing containers for over 10 years to engineers and operations teams at large. It was started in 2014 by Craig and Joe, along with a small number of Seattle engineers. Today it is the most active project on Github with over 1000 contributors. Kubernetes has developed a following among developers as a practical, platform agnostic framework for application development and management of container packaged applications. Its popularity stems not only from the quality of the technology, but also the openness and transparency of its community. Gartner has recognized Kubernetes as the most widely deployed technology for container orchestration.
Beyond Google, Kubernetes has been adopted by large technology companies like Red Hat, IBM, VMWare and Canonical to manage clusters of containers on their customers infrastructure. The project is now housed in the Cloud Native Computing Foundation, part of the Linux Foundation."
“We believe that Kubernetes is a seed technology that enables businesses to transform their approach to IT, significantly reducing infrastructure costs and simplifying operations,” said Craig McLuckie, CEO. “While the technology is incredibly powerful, we have seen developers struggle to get up and running quickly. Heptio’s early focus is on making Kubernetes more accessible to developers running apps on-premises or in the public cloud. In the future we plan to work closely with the open ecosystem to advance the platform, and deliver the features enterprises need to run Kubernetes at scale.”
“We’ve gotten to know Craig and Joe pretty well and their unique insights as the creators of Kubernetes,” said Ping Li, partner at Accel. “It means there isn’t a better team out there to help companies take full advantage of the capabilities of Kubernetes, one of the most cutting-edge open source technologies out there.”
Jim Zemlin, Executive Director for the Linux Foundation said, “The mission of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation is to support safe innovation in the container, orchestration and micro-services space. We are pleased to see entrepreneurs like Craig and Joe who were instrumental in the formation of CNCF, stepping forward to help enterprises adopt powerful new technologies like Kubernetes. We are heartened by their commitment to both open source and open community initiatives.”
Before creating Kubernetes, Craig and Joe worked together to create and deliver Google Compute Engine (Google’s infrastructure-as-a-service product). We will follow up with more on Heptio going forward.