Cloud computing infrastructure management startup Bluebricks Ltd. says it’s looking to disrupt the infrastructure-as-code industry after closing on a $4.5 million seed funding round today.
The round was led by Flint Capital and Glilot Capital Partners, and saw participation from a host of angel investors, including Yochay Ettun, chief executive of Cnvrg.io Inc., which was acquired by Intel Corp., and Raz Shaked, head of DevOps at Wiz Inc.
IaC tools have become popular with enterprises because they can help to automate the setup, provisioning and management of cloud infrastructure for applications using simple snippets of code, which is much faster than adjusting hundreds of settings manually.
Traditionally, the process of invoking an application in the cloud has been complex and tedious, with teams required to provision and configure each infrastructure resource separately, define the security and access rules, and set up each component of the app. All of these tasks can be simplified using code.
However, Bluebricks and its investors argue that existing IaC tools such as HashiCorp Inc.’s Terraform and Pulumi struggle to scale in multicloud environments, meaning that organizations are often forced to intervene manually. The problem is that when a snippet of code is edited to alter something within an app’s environment, that change can have unintended consequences elsewhere, given the monolithic nature of IaC code.
As a result, companies often end up having to hire dedicated site reliability engineers or DevOps teams to manage their cloud infrastructure anyway. Such skills don’t come cheap, with the average salary for an experience specialist around $200,000 per year, Bluebricks says. IaC thus becomes more expensive and almost as complex as the traditional way of doing things, defeating the entire purpose of using it.
Bluebricks wants to address these problems and scale IaC so it’s appropriate for even the most complex and sprawling applications and systems that run on multiple cloud platforms. To do this, it has created its proprietary Atomic Infrastructure technology, which is the first IaC offering that’s able to fragment infrastructure management into small, reusable blueprints that minimize the “blast radius” of code changes.
By doing this, Bluebricks says, it enables true and affordable hyper-automation for application teams. The startup is positioning its technology as an alternative to Terraform and Pulumi, and cites a number of reasons why it is superior.
The most important thing is that, unlike Terraform and Pulumi, Bluebrick’s Atomic Infrastructure doesn’t treat infrastructure code as a monolith, the company said. It also has the ability to automate infrastructure updates while enabling granular control and ownership. It enables safe, artificial intelligence-driven software delivery and reduces associated infrastructure management costs by an order of magnitude, the company claims.
In addition, Bluebricks differentiates its IaC offering by preserving code ownership for customers, so they won’t feel as if they’re locked in to using its platform.
Bluebricks co-founder and Chief Executive Idan Yalovich (pictured center, alongside co-founders Nitzan Gindi and Pini Vaknin) said generative artificial intelligence is making software programming available on-demand for almost every worker. With everyone creating their own applications, he argues they’ll need a solid ground to build them on. “At Bluebricks, our Atomic Infrastructure technology enables enterprises to become AI-ready instantly and at an infinite scale,” he said.
The startup said it is already working with a number of notable clients, including several “unicorn” startups valued at more than $1 billion, showcasing the ability of its IaC offering to serve high-growth companies.
Bluebricks reckons it will see big demand for its IaC tools in the coming years, as trends signal that more enterprises will adopt multicloud strategies in future, moving from siloed operations to integrated infrastructure platforms. As such, they’ll need a better way to manage their cloud infrastructures at scale.
It’s a belief that’s shared by Flint Capital’s David Feldman, who said Bluebricks’ technical depth and unparalleled understanding of the pain points of IaC is exactly what the industry has been missing. “Their ability to combine automated provisioning with precise control reduces the risks associated with scaling complex cloud environments,” he said.