Why we Invested in Spectro Cloud

Call it Ubiquitous Computing (as envisioned by Mark Weiser in 1988 at Xerox PARC) or Pervasive Computing, the ability to run any application and access data anywhere from any compute platform continues to be the main driving force behind modern IT innovations. Apart from the fact that we believe Spectro Cloud has one of the best teams for delivering robust cloud infrastructure software, their drive to realize this lofty dream of “ubicomp” is our key reason to invest in them and be a part of their journey.

The cloud was a major step towards this panacea of ubicomp by unlocking computing from its datacenter cages. With the growing popularity of cloud, many providers jumped in to take advantage of this tremendous market opportunity and thus ushered in the era of multi-cloud. However, with multi-cloud came a new kind of lock-in. Every cloud had different APIs and with lack of standardization, the goal of any compute anywhere seemed like a distant dream again.

This team’s first startup, CliQr technologies, was a step in this direction to enable unified management and standardization across clouds. Meanwhile similar efforts from different startups (in particular DotCloud which renamed itself to Docker) led to the popularity of containers — a lighter-weight dev-friendly virtualization technology providing greater potability. We also saw Kubernetes (or K8S) emerge as the de-facto container orchestration technology.

With containers and K8S, it seems that we were on the verge of achieving this goal of ubicomp. But just like with multi-cloud, we are now seeing the rise of multi-K8S. Different providers are locking in users to their own opinionated K8S stacks. While not only is this taking away flexibility that an Enterprise would want, it is also resulting in lock-in. Public clouds may offer simplicity with their managed K8S, but even basic use-cases like differing development environment on public cloud and production environment on private cloud cannot be handled easily because of the differences in the stacks. The large infrastructure vendors are even worse — not only are their stacks opinionated, but very hard to implement requiring months of professional services (and you know who I am referring to!).

Spectro Cloud solves this problem. Spectro Cloud is the only company to provide a way to construct your own K8S stack flexibly (including OS, upstream K8S, your flavor of storage, network and security), describe it using Infrastructure as Code profiles and run it on any public, private or edge environment.

With Spectro Cloud in place, an enterprise can provide the same K8S fabric across all its environments to realize its Ubiquitous Computing needs, seamlessly and consistently.

And at WestWave Capital, we will continue to back such amazing teams trying to solve the most difficult challenges that lie ahead of us in computing.