Unlocking the Full Power of DevOps
By Mo Islam, Partner, Threshold Ventures
I am thrilled to announce Threshold is leading a $15million Series A for OpsLevel. OpsLevel is building a unified developer platform where teams can own, operate and understand their production infrastructure. I am excited to join the board and work closely with the founders John Laban and Ken Rose, along with the broader OpsLevel team.
Two of the most important software trends over the past decade are the rise of microservices and the rapid adoption of DevOps.
Microservice architectures allow teams to break up large monolithic applications into smaller, independent and loosely coupled services that can communicate over well-defined APIs. While the paradigm of microservice architectures isn’t a new one, the use of microservices has proliferated across engineering teams to help them build modern software at scale.
In parallel, the adoption of DevOps has created a culture and mindset of “you build it, you own it.” DevOps has shifted microservice ownership to development teams, allowing them to build and ship microservices independently and rapidly. With faster product iterations and shorter feedback cycles, teams have been able to build and ship software more quickly than ever before.
While this “left shift” has increased agility, it has not been without important tradeoffs. As the number of microservices increases and the number of services individual developers need to manage piles up, multiple challenges emerge:
- Reliability — who can help debug this service that’s not responding?
- Security — who can patch this vulnerability?
- Quality — who should receive this bug report?
- Maintenance — who can upgrade this service to the new framework?
Once faced with these problems, engineering teams will often resort to tracking service ownership in spreadsheets, a solution that quickly becomes unsustainable as the engineering team and its microservices scale.
This developer pain is exactly what OpsLevel solves.
OpsLevel’s product is a service catalog that unifies operational, security and infrastructure data for development teams. World-class teams at companies like Zapier, Outreach, Convoy, Auth0, UnderAmour and Segment are happy customers, and are using OpsLevel to unlock the power of DevOps for their engineering organizations.
The OpsLevel founders John and Ken understand this problem intimately. John was the first employee at PagerDuty, and served as its VP of engineering at a critical juncture. Ken was one of the first twenty employees at PagerDuty, served as a tech lead there and then later did the same at Shopify.
Their shared engineering experience in maintaining services that were mission-critical is now the foundation to help engineering teams proactively manage their service ownership.
We are fortunate to have tremendous co-investors along for this journey, including our friends at Vertex Ventures, S28 Capital, and Webb Investment Network. A number of fantastic operator angels have also joined us, including:
- Grant Miller (CEO and co-founder of Replicated)
- Andrew Miklas (CTO and co-founder of PagerDuty)
- Andrew Peterson, Zane Lackey, and Nick Galbreath (co-founders of Signal Sciences)
- Luca Martinetti (CTO and co-founder of TrueLayer)
- Maynard Webb (COO of eBay)
- Yuri Sagalov (CEO and co-founder of AeroFS/Redbooth)
- Ben Vinegar and David Hayes (VPs of engineering & product at Sentry)
- Evan Weaver (CTO and co-founder of Fauna)
- Emily Kramer and Kathleen Estreich (MKT1 Capital & former VPs of marketing at Carta & Scalyr)
- Aaron Rankin (CTO and co-founder of Sprout Social)
We are thrilled to partner with John and Ken, and are inspired by their vision to build the best developer experience for managing production infrastructure so that engineering teams can focus on building great software. Congratulations to the entire OpsLevel team!