The 10 Hottest DevOps Technology Startups Of 2018
Next-Gen DevOps
In the digital age, enterprises are confronted with the challenge of delivering software like the internet startups of yesteryear.
No matter the sector, large companies increasingly need to update customer- and employee-facing applications at a rapid cadence, deploy workloads across distributed infrastructures including the public cloud, scale their applications cost-effectively, and secure valuable data as it travels well beyond the perimeter of their corporate networks.
That imperative for agile software development has ushered in the age of DevOps—a methodology that enables software-powered business innovation by breaking down the wall once separating developers from IT operations teams.
The companies on this list are encouraging a wider embrace of DevOps by delivering the tools and platforms that seamlessly merge its two components, removing the friction that slows projects as they go from lines of code to mission-critical workloads.
DivvyCloud
CEO: Brian Johnson
The Washington, D.C.-based cloud automation specialist simplifies management of IT across public and private clouds by focusing on compliance, security and performance.
DivvyCloud secures the perimeter of DevOps infrastructure by taking advantage of software-defined networking and cloud APIS, allowing enterprise software teams to enjoy the efficiency and flexibility of the hybrid cloud.
The startup's technology discovers assets across platforms, including all virtual machines, storage, network configurations and firewalls. It then allows users to set automated policies and monitors in real-time deployments in AWS, Azure and GCP to ensure regulatory compliance.
Fugue
CEO: Phillip Merrick
Fugue looks to reduce the risks inherent in deploying distributed applications in the cloud by automating infrastructure provisioning, security and compliance capabilities.
The Frederick, Md.-based startup offers solutions for code validation, access control, multi-account management, and continuous policy enforcement.
DevOps teams use Fugue to rapidly spin up and take down development and staging environments, enabling them to innovate rapidly. They can simplify and share infrastructure compositions, pattern libraries and best practices to ensure consistency across workloads.
Fugue's policy-as-code approach ensures that infrastructure is only deployed once it's been validated as free of policy or security violations. And if violations arise after deployment, Fugue remediates by automatically reverting unauthorized changes back to a known baseline.
Kong
CEO: Augusto Marietti
Kong delivers an API platform that supports modern DevOps process.
DevOps teams depend on the open source technology to secure, connect and orchestrate the APIs that connect the micro-services constituting cloud-native applications.
Kong 1.0, launched in September, updates the technology with additional DevOps-enabling features.
The San Francisco-based startup's platform enables agile development teams to intelligently broker information across services and control the entire service architecture, whether it's monolithic or implemented with micro-services.
Morpheus Data
Chairman: Jeff Drazan
Morpheus Data's platform enables customers to standardize cloud management while taking advantage of application-centric DevOps automation.
The startup helps enterprises reduce tool sprawl and capitalize off existing investments with enhanced automation of popular DevOps technologies like Kubernetes, HashiCorp's Terraform, and Microsoft Azure Resource Manager.
Morpheus' infrastructure-as-code application blueprints are agnostic to infrastructure and cloud. The solution combines declarative scripting with a graphical interface, giving administrators a single point of control.
The startup also enables IT teams to easily deploy Kubernetes-based clusters alongside other cloud technologies.
NGINX
CEO: Gus Robertson
Since this startup, founded in 2011, took charge of the popular web server technology developed years earlier, it has introduced solutions to scale high-performance web applications created by DevOps teams.
San Francisco-based NGINX has focused on enabling continuous integration/continuous delivery processes across the entire lifecycle of an application.
In addition to typical web-server functionality like proxying and load balancing, the NGINX Application Platform has been expanded to power delivery of containerized workloads. That capability enables enterprises to easily scale applications built from micro-services across distributed environments.
Portshift
CEO: Ran Ilany
Portshift looks to free DevOps teams from having to constantly worry about security as they try to work fast.
The Tel Aviv-headquartered startup from Team8, an Israeli incubator, recently came out of stealth with technology that introduces identity-based application protection throughout the continuous integration/continuous delivery process.
That identity-driven security paradigm effectively implements a zero-trust policy that can protect any application running in any cloud. Security teams can define broad policies that are automatically enforced throughout the application lifecycle, and DevOps teams can focus solely on developing and deploying their workloads.
Redgate
CEO: Simon Galbraith
While this privately held U.K.-headquartered company has been around since 1999, it has made a name for itself in recent years with its work supporting DevOps adoption.
Redgate, based in Cambridge, has a long history of developing popular data tools for the Microsoft ecosystem. Its technology is widely found in SQL Server, .NET and Azure environments
But as enterprises shift to agile software development methods, Redgate has innovated like a young startup, enabling DevOps for the database.
Redgate's Compliant Database DevOps solution provides an end-to-end framework for extending the methodology to SQL Server while ensuring regulatory compliance and locking-down data.
The company's database tools also integrate with application development software used by DevOps teams.
Refactr
CEO: Michael Fraser
Refactr is looking to shake up the red-hot configuration management arena with a platform geared for MSPs that want to ease provisioning of secure cloud environments.
The Seattle-based company founded last year looks to deliver DevOps capabilities with no-code visual tools that connect cloud infrastructure and services, deliver operating system automation and API integrations.
Refactr's Cloud + Security Architect Platform (CSAP), as the name suggests, emphasizes security, allowing small to midsize MSPs focused on verticals like financial services and health care to build enforced configurations and remediate problems.
Snapt
CEO: Dave Blakey
This Atlanta-headquartered startup with South African roots offers an Application Delivery Controller that's built to perform in DevOps environments.
Founded in 2012, Snapt delivers load balancing, security, caching and acceleration for websites, applications and services developed with agile methodologies and deployed at a rapid cadence.
Snapt's controller distributes requests between servers and optimizes and offloads content to make sure websites and applications load quickly and are always online.
SonarSource
CEO: Olivier Gaudin
This Geneva-based developer is behind SonarQube, a popular tool for evaluating the quality of an application's code before it's pushed into production.
SonarQube detects bugs, code smells and security vulnerabilities across more than 20 programming languages.
SonarSource offers open source and commercial solutions for enterprise-grade continuous code-quality management, reducing risks of faulty deployments as DevOps teams iterate rapidly.