DEVOPSdigest

Rafay Systems announced the general availability of its turnkey, SaaS-based offering designed to confront a complex set of ongoing challenges enterprises and service providers face when modernizing their applications.

The company also announced $8 million in Series A funding led by Ridge Ventures, an early stage venture capital fund investing in experienced founders redefining how the world uses software. NTT DOCOMO Ventures also participated in the round, along with Costanoa Ventures and Moment Ventures, both of which previously participated in the company's $4.1 million seed round.

Devops and site reliability engineering (SRE) teams can leverage Rafay's offering to reduce the complexity they face today when deploying and operating applications in Kubernetes environments, resulting in faster time to market for new business capabilities. Rafay's application abstraction, cluster blueprinting and enterprise-ready integration features make it the ideal platform for multi-region, multi-cloud, hybrid and edge/Multi-access Edge Computing (MEC) adoption.

Rafay is led by its two co-founders: CEO Haseeb Budhani and VP of Engineering Hemanth Kavurulu. Both have extensive backgrounds in systems development, cloud networking, and network security. Before founding Rafay Systems, Haseeb and Hemanth worked together to create Soha Systems, which was acquired by Akamai Technologies in 2016. The Soha platform is currently being sold by Akamai as Enterprise Application Access (EAA).

"Kubernetes is a crucial innovation that has fast-tracked the industry's adoption of containerized applications running in any cloud, hybrid or edge environment," said Budhani. "But Kubernetes presents a steep learning curve to companies embarking on app modernization journeys. At Rafay, we are on a mission to make Kubernetes easy to consume by any company, regardless of how far along they are on their journey. The Rafay platform empowers DevOps teams to focus on their business critical software development instead of building and maintaining complex internal tools."

"Rafay represents a successful, experienced team bringing innovation to a market ripe for disruption," said Ben Metcalfe, investor at Ridge Ventures. "Just as Amazon created an entire cloud industry based on unifying and abstracting disparate open source tools, we see parallels for revolutionizing software automation, management, and app distribution. We believe Rafay has a major role to play in that transformation. Rafay saw this gap and has built a comprehensive platform that every enterprise can use."

Rafay builds on top of native Kubernetes and managed Kubernetes services by delivering a number of industry-leading differentiated capabilities, including:

- Application Abstraction: Rafay's prescriptive application framework makes it easy to define and manage lifecycle for containerized apps - from deployment to ongoing operations.

- Cluster Blueprinting: Rafay's Kubernetes cluster management and customization capabilities ensure reliable cluster operations and efficient bring-up in any environment.

- Multi-cluster Federation: Rafay's container and metadata distribution capabilities make it easy to deploy and operate containerized applications across any number of Kubernetes clusters, spread across any number of regions or hybrid environments.

- Enterprise Integrations: Rafay's broad suite of one-click productivity features simplify the adoption of critical technologies, such as secrets management, runtime configuration updates, and log & metrics aggregation.

The Rafay platform is generally available.