Announcing Our Investment In CloudQuery
The open-source cloud asset inventory powered by SQL
We’re excited to announce our investment in CloudQuery’s $3.5M Seed round, alongside boldstart, Mango Capital, and Haystack!
CloudQuery extracts, transforms, and loads your cloud assets into a SQL database, enabling DevOps and security teams to assess, audit, and monitor the configuration of their cloud assets.
The Problem
2021 has been a big year for cloud. Earlier this year, Gartner predicted spending on global public cloud services would reach $332 billion. In Q3 alone, AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud recorded cumulative revenue over $40 billion. However, today all signs indicate that cloud transformation is still in the early innings and there is so much more to come.
With that said, security will need to make big changes or risk impeding companies’ cloud adoption and usage. Earlier in the year, I wrote about how despite the multitude of vendors and mountains of cash being poured into the industry, securing the cloud is easier said than done. After talking with practitioners across our customer network, it’s clear that there are still major gaps in personnel, interoperability, and expertise.
Security hygiene remains a huge problem. Cloud resources are often left misconfigured out in the open and vulnerable to attacks. Researchers from the cloud security company DivvyCloud found that breaches caused by cloud misconfigurations cost companies worldwide an estimated $5 trillion in 2018 and 2019. Another study found that 84% of IT professionals are concerned that their organization has already suffered a major cloud breach that they have yet to discover. Much of this owing to the fact that traditional security tools are insufficient for today’s cloud environments.
As a workaround from legacy security solutions, developers are also writing one-off scripts that act as guardrails to help them govern their cloud assets, but ad hoc scripts pose their own management issues at scale. This is further compounded by the growing list of APIs to support across cloud infrastructure and SaaS applications.
The Solution
Launched earlier this year as an open source project, CloudQuery is the first tool that allows developers to aggregate all of their cloud assets in a relational database and query the data with SQL.
Through the power of SQL, users can easily get started without learning a new domain-specific language, make use of the 100+ pre-built queries, and build and share custom queries with the community. CloudQuery already has a library of supported infrastructure, including the usual suspects AWS, Azure, and GCP, as well as Okta, Terraform, k8s, and more. Even better is that the community is getting deeply involved and contributing their own integrations to new resources.
Aside from cloud infrastructure discovery, other use cases popping up include the ability to implement security and compliance policies, monitor for infrastructure drift, and manage cloud costs.
What’s been incredibly exciting to see is the reception from the infrastructure and security community. The open source project has over 1.8k stars on GitHub, and is in use by major enterprises like Bloomberg, Salesforce, and Zendesk. To top it off, users are showcasing and shouting out ways they’re leveraging the product.
The Team
CloudQuery was founded by Yevgeny Pats and Ron Eliahu. I first met Yevgeny back in 2016 when he was the founder of Perception Point. Even though we didn’t invest at the time, I was blown away by his knowledge and passion, and kept in touch as a trusted friend to talk through emerging trends in the security industry. Since then, Yevgeny has built companies and projects, such as Phish.ai and Fuzzit (acquired by GitLab) and I have always been impressed by his relentless hustle and drive.
When we started talking about his new endeavor CloudQuery, I knew that he was onto something big. Not only did he have a well thought out concept, but he had already begun to get massive traction and proof points from the developer community on Hacker News and Reddit. As it came time to take it to the next level, I was honored to join Yevgeny on the adventure.
💻 Checkout a demo of CloudQuery at our recent NY Enterprise Tech Meetup, where Yevgeny presents in front of our audience of 150+ enterprise tech founders, operators, Fortune 500 executives, and VCs, alongside Jeff Yoshimura, Chief Marketing and Customer Experience Officer at Snyk.
📚 Read more in TechCrunch and on the CloudQuery blog.
Congratulations to Yevgeny, Ron, and the CloudQuery team!
