ANN Backplane: Dismantle your Routing Rube Goldberg Machine
“Back in the days when I was young I’m not a kid anymore
But some days I sit and wish I was a kid again” — Ahmad
Remember back in the day when you owned servers you cooled with an oscillating fan, in the office closet? Remember how you gave them loving hostnames after Simpsons or Star Wars characters? There were so few hostnames you remembered Marge was the mail server, and Homer was where you dumped all the Word docs to share with others. That was production at its most raw.
Later, IaaS brought us compute and network on-demand which shifted us from static to dynamic environments; so long Marge and Homer. This shift ignited a firework display of new tech to solve many of the new problems it brought. We have Packer and Docker for bundling application code with environments, some send code to platforms using git, Terraform saves us from all the painful cloud libraries written several times over in nearly every language out there. These bundles / processes / containers can be orchestrated with Mesos, Kubernetes, Nomad, and others. The servers these are scheduled across run -cloud- container OSs for now, but maybe one day we won’t need servers at all — Did you know HTTP handlers are the new main()?!
In this fast-paced era we hurled toward engineering productivity like never before, and built systems capable of feats we could only imagine a few years ago. But we missed a few stops along the way, and one of those stops I hold near and dear to my heart: Connectivity.
While orchestration sets the stage for connectivity, there is still a large amount of work to wrap around it: Service Discovery, Routing, TLS Management, Firewalls, to start, and then naturally comes OAuth, Identity, A/B testing, Feature flags, RBAC / ABAC, and so much more, and this is all implemented over and over and over again and each gets weeded across polyglot environments making it next to impossible to manage it all.
Break the cycle
To break the cycle we must stop forcing our old ways of custom scripts, glue-code, adding and managing more infrastructure, stuffing Lua plugins into legacy load-balancers, etc. Instead we can consume it all as unified service and focus on writing and running the code that matters to our customers and our business.
Backplane’s agent combined with our globally managed network of smart proxies will radically transform the way we bind our services, applications, and devices running in and across clouds, data centers, and even our home appliances. Backplane Core eliminates the need for hundreds of hours of custom code through its powerful, uniform API and CLI. With Backplane, by reducing this complexity we put more power into the hands of technologists to manage the connectivity of their apps in a dramatically more secure, and faster way.
Getting started
The entire process is simple and powerful. Backplane is a fully-managed service that eliminates thousands of hours provisioning and maintaining even the most complex network stack, all with a simple command: `$ backplane connect`
How we got here
Today we also announced a $5M seed round led by Baseline Ventures and Harrison Metal Capital. We are confident this funding will set the stage for continued growth. Our funding announcement sends a strong message to our team, our customers, and our investors that we are positioned to continue our momentum, and earn our place as a leader in the industry.
Top companies rely on Backplane everyday: from Turner Broadcasting and Mux, to Kickoff Labs. I am thankful for the early-adopters, and humbled by the industry response to our products. It affirms why we are building this company.
Backplane joins an impressive list of Baseline Ventures portfolio companies, including Twitter, Heroku, and Instagram. This funding also supports the growth of our team significantly in the last few months. We have made key hires in engineering, marketing and sales roles. Thank you to every user, investor, advisor and friend who helped us get here today. I am excited to lead us as we continue to grow.
We’ve achieved our success by hiring smart people who want to solve complex problems for our customers. We’re looking for the right people to help us.
