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Rafay Systems, a platform provider for Kubernetes operations, has announced a $25 million Series B investment round headed by ForgePoint Capital, with previous investors Ridge Ventures, Costanoa Ventures, and Moment Ventures also participating. Rafay Systems plans to utilize the money to keep employing top engineers and expand its sales, marketing, and customer success teams.
Rafay Systems’s offering unifies Kubernetes infrastructure while modernizing application lifecycle management requirements. This new funding is aimed at helping the company realize its strategic vision for the Kubernetes Operations Platform.
The platform, which is delivered as a cloud-native service, combines features for application automation, security, visibility, and governance, while also simplifying Kubernetes operations across all environments. Rafay’s long-term vision for Kubernetes Operations is based on their experience with clients in the financial, healthcare, telecom, and technology industries that are quickly 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,” said Leo Casusol, Venture Partner at ForgePoint Capital who will be joining the board. “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.”
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Rafay Systems’ Vision for Kubernetes Operations
Rafay sees a fundamental need to move 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 in order to deliver modern applications and infrastructure at the speed and efficiency enterprises demand.
Instead of spending quite some money and effort recreating the Kubernetes Operations wheel, businesses can use Rafay’s Kubernetes Operations Platform to accelerate enterprise-wide projects. It would complement an enterprise platform team by working with them to expedite application modernization projects using the platform’s comprehensive collection of services.
Rafay Systems would allow developers, DevOps, operations, and security teams to collaborate to deliver contemporary apps quicker, reduce downtime, and eliminate security and compliance concerns. SREs and DevOps teams may triage infrastructure and application issues quicker than ever before with the Kubernetes Operations Platform, decreasing mean-time-to-resolution substantially (MTTR).
AWS, Azure, GCP
According to Rafay Systems, the Kubernetes Operation Platform benefits are available to businesses regardless of where they are on their application modernization path. The platform’s operations-centric approach is unique, as it improves the efficacy of all tools and processes that go into delivering contemporary, containerized applications.
It can help enterprises run managed Kubernetes services like Amazon EKS and Microsoft AKS, as well as packaged offerings like RedHat OpenShift, on any infrastructure (e.g., in data centers, public clouds like AWS, Azure, and GCP, or at remote/Edge locations), and it can work with any infrastructure (e.g., in data centers, public clouds like AWS, Azure, and GCP, or at remote/Edge locations).
The Kubernetes Operations Platform from Rafay Systems provides a variety of platform services including:
- Cluster Management Service – Supports lifecycle management and blueprinting for managed Kubernetes services such as Amazon EKS and Azure AKS, as well as RedHat OpenShift solutions. This service also includes the gathering of logs and analytics, storage management, and secret management.
- GitOps Service – Using multi-stage, git-triggered pipelines, it is possible to orchestrate infrastructure and deliver applications.
- Zero-Trust Access Service – With just-in-time service account generation and user-level credential management, it allows developers, SREs, and automation systems to have regulated, audited access to Kubernetes infrastructure.
- Kubernetes Policy Management Service – For Kubernetes security and governance, use the Open Policy Agent (OPA) architecture to provide policy administration for clusters.
- Backup & Restore Service – The Kubernetes control plane and application data may be recovered and migrated in the event of a disaster.
- Visibility & Monitoring Service – Dedicated dashboards allow development, operations, and security/governance teams to see and monitor apps and underlying Kubernetes infrastructure.
“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,” said Haseeb Budhani, CEO of Rafay Systems. “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.”
ForgePoint Capital, founded in 2015, is a multi-stage venture capital firm focused on startups that safeguard the digital future. ForgePoint Capital’s objective is to work with entrepreneurs who are helping to digitize, if not already digitalize, our planet. To build the next generation of cybersecurity and infrastructure firms, the team is dedicated to connecting entrepreneurs with advisers, customers, executives, and partners.
