Beyond Chaos into Reliability Engineering: announcing boldstart’s investment in Steadybit.
Over the past decade and a half, we’ve witnessed the explosive growth of cloud infrastructure. Today’s largest SaaS companies serve millions of customers who are paying billions of dollars in revenue. However despite this adoption, every software company continues to battle for higher availability and improved resilience of their software because it directly impacts their financial bottom line.
At boldstart, we love partnering on day one with technical founders solving huge challenges by making developers more productive. For example, Snyk was born 7 years ago when organizations began adopting continuous development, and thus security vulnerabilities had to be found and fixed earlier in the cycle, which had a major impact on both velocity and overall security.
While methods like continuous development have allowed these services to scale in the cloud, the availability of these services remains a massive challenge — because even the cloud providers themselves are not 100% reliable. Product and operations teams are in constantly battling the balance between shipping new features fast and the reliability of their software that’s running in the cloud.
Enter Steadybit, which makes resilience testing for operations / SREs, DevOps, and developers orders of magnitude better, faster, and cheaper.
We first met Benjamin Wilms, Dennis Schulte, and Johannes Edmeier through our friend Ameet Patel in early 2020. They had a unique insight into ‘chaos engineering”, which at that time we thought was more a method than a product / market. But what got me on a plane to Germany was that Steadybit could make it easier for developers to understand how system events impacted the availability of their specific application — which historically wasn’t possible.
For example, what happens if a region of AWS goes down or if there is a misconfiguration in Kubernetes Both of these scenarios will impact the quality of a developer’s application yet it’s beyond the scope of what developers can currently test or control. Steadybit provides the ability for teams to continuously test the quality of their applications — much earlier in the development cycle resulting in continuous verification. It’s a lot like a flight simulator, which tests new and existing airplanes for fault tolerance, and trains pilots to address those conditions. Unlike other tools, Steadybit is designed to fit both an SRE and developer workflows.
Fast forward and Steadybit is now working with some of the world’s largest SaaS companies to shift cloud reliability testing left and spot weak spots or issues with a deployment well before it gets to production. It is pushing the boundaries of what was previously possible. Prior to Steadybit, 2 SREs could work with 10–20 product teams to test their resilience and now that testing can scale to over 400 product teams. It’s a huge step towards embedding operations closer to development and improving both availability and the financial bottom line.
Welcome Steadybit to the boldstart family. More can be read here from the Steadybit blog post along with a story by Ron Miller on TechCrunch.
