Dev

Shopify acquires Remix to bolster its storefront design tools • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on November 1, 2022Posted in acquisition, Apps, Commerce, Dev, react, Spotify, Startups, web developmentNo Comments

Remix, a startup developing an open source web framework similar to Next.js, has been acquired by Shopify, the companies announced in a joint statement today. The financial terms weren’t disclosed, but in a blog post, Remix CEO Michael Jackson said that Remix will receive “long-term backing and support” from Shopify that will allow it to “grow faster” and “sharpen its focus on performance and scalability.” “You’ll be seeing a lot more [of the Remix framework] in the wild, powering some of the largest commercial sites on the web,” Jackson said. “In addition, Shopify itself will use Remix across many projects, and you can expect to see more of Shopify’s developer platform include first-class support for Remix over time.” Remix was co-founded by Jackson — an ex-Twitter engineer — and Ryan Florence in 2020. The two worked together for years creating open source tools around React, a JavaScript library for building app UIs, before deciding to launch the eponymous Remix framework. One of Jackson’s and Florence’s best-known projects is React Router, a library for React, which has been downloaded almost a billion times. Not coincidentally, Shopify originally used React Router to architect Hydrogen, the company’s front-end web development framework for building custom Shopify storefronts. As for Remix, it’s a full-stack web framework that’s designed to leverage distributed systems and native browser features while abstracting away back-end server tasks. Compatible with public cloud environments, including Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud, Netlify, Vercel and Cloudflare Workers, one of Remix’s key features is prefetching — the framework can prefetch elements of a web page in parallel, including buttons and forms, before a user clicks on a link to minimize page loading. Prior to the Shopify acquisition, Remix had raised $3 million in seed capital from OSS Capital and angel investors Naval Ravikant, Ram Shriram and Sahil Lavingia. In a post on the Shopify Engineering blog, Dion Almaer, VP of engineering at Shopify, said that the purchase of Remix will benefit both Shopify developers and merchants by bringing improvements to Hydrogen. “Remix will continue to be an independent and open-source framework,” Almaer said. “Remix will tackle challenges that developers building on Hydrogen have encountered around data loading, routing, and error handling … Shopify will use Remix across many projects where it makes sense, and you can expect to see more of our developer platform with first-class Remix support over time.” Remix is Shopify’s first acquisition since Deliverr, the fulfillment tech provider that the e-commerce giant purchased in May for $2.1 billion. Earlier in the year, Shopify snatched up Dovetail, which helps brands manage influencer marketing campaigns. The company also recently invested in Single, a music and video app used by many businesses on Shopify, following equity pledges in CMS developer Sanity and marketing automation startup Klaviyo. After a rocky Q2, there are signs that Shopify is beginning to better weather the economic downturn. The company posted smaller-than-expected Q3 losses last week, leading shares to jump as high as 17%.

Devtron raises fresh capital for its cloud DevOps platform • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on October 26, 2022Posted in Apps, Dev, devops, Enterprise, funding, Insight Partners, StartupsNo Comments

The cloud-native market has seen the introduction of a range of open source DevOps tools — tools that combine software development and IT operations — built to address very specific use cases. As a result, DevOps teams today have too many narrow choices that don’t work together seamlessly or that can’t be integrated into a single platform. At least, that’s the opinion of Prashant Ghildiyal, one of the co-founders of Devtron, a startup offering a platform to address what he believes are the top challenges facing the DevOps space. A container management system, Devtron offers a low-code delivery platform optimized for Kubernetes. (“Containers” are packages of software that contain the necessary elements to run in any environment.) The platform handles app management, security and more, providing an interface that abstracts away the underlying infrastructure. To Ghildiyal’s point, there’s evidence to suggest that there’s a gap between DevOps adoption and success. In a 2019 Harvard Business Review survey, only 10% of developers said that their companies were successful at building and deploying software quickly, with less than half (48%) saying their organization always relies on DevOps methodologies. A separate, more recent poll by infrastructure automation company Puppet found that companies were hitting a number of DevOps speed bumps in the race to be cloud native, including a skills shortage, issues with legacy architecture, organizational resistance to change and limited or lack of automation. Investors are keen on Devtron, as evidenced by the company today closing a $12 million funding round led by Insight Partners. “Devtron integrates with products across the lifecycle of microservices, and in particular Kubernetes, enabling its users to deploy faster and automate their CI/CD pipelines without worrying about Kubernetes knowhow,” Insight Partners principal Josh Zelman told ZebethMedia via email. Ghildiyal says that he and Devtron’s other co-founders, Nishant Kumar and Rajesh Razdan, experienced the challenges of scaling DevOps firsthand in their previous roles as heads of technology and software architects at various startups. Their experiences informed Devtron’s design, which Ghildiyal describes as “DevOps in a box,” with tools that provide audit logs and metrics showing the state of an organization’s DevOps maturity. Devtron also provides tools for access controls and policy management, as well as environment orchestration, software delivery workflow and cost. “This saves significant time and resources to build and deploy in production,” Zelman added. Ghildiyal sees Devtron competing against formidable incumbent vendors like GitLab and Harness in a DevOps market that was worth an estimated $4 billion in 2020, according to Global Market Insights. (That’s not to mention startups like Render, which raised $20 million last November after winning our Disrupt SF 2019 Startup Battlefield.) When asked about clients, Ghildiyal said Devtron has “several” unicorns and growth-stage companies as commercial customers, but he declined to reveal names — or Devtron’s revenue. Ghildiyal said that India-based Devtron’s principal focuses post-fundraise will be resources and cost optimizations to “enable DevOps automation and efficiency at scale.”

Fermyon raises $20M to build tools for cloud app dev • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on October 24, 2022Posted in Amplify Partners, Apps, cloud, Dev, Enterprise, Fermyon, funding, Insight Partners, startup, Startups, WebAssemblyNo Comments

Matt Butcher and Radu Matei worked on container technologies for years, “containers” in this context referring to software packages containing all the necessary elements to run in any environment, from desktop PCs to servers. As engineers at Deis, and then DeisLabs once Microsoft acquired it in 2017, their team explored the container landscape and built the package manager Helm as well as Brigade and other tooling. Along the journey, they faced myriad problems with containers — namely speed and cost. The setbacks spurred them and a handful of other DeisLabs veterans to found Fermyon, which today closed a $20 million Series A funding round led by Insight Partners with participation from Amplify Partners and angel investors. Fermyon offers a managed cloud service, Fermyon Cloud, that allows developers to quickly build microservices, or pieces of apps that work independently, but together (e.g., if one microservice fails, it won’t bring down the others). “Fermyon is building the next wave of cloud services atop WebAssembly,” Butcher said, referring to the open standard that allows web browsers to run binary code. “Originally written for the browser, WebAssembly has all of the earmarks of an excellent cloud compute platform … [Its] combination of features got us excited. Fermyon set out to build a suite of tools that enables developers to build, deploy, and then operate WebAssembly binaries in a cloud context.” Butcher argues WebAssembly is superior to containers in a number of respects, such as start-up time and compatibility across operating systems including Windows, Linux and Mac plus hardware platforms like Intel and Arm. It’s also more secure, he asserts, because it can safely execute even untrusted code. To explore WebAssembly’s container-replacing potential, Fermyon developed Spin, an open source dev tool for creating WebAssembly cloud apps. Fermyon Cloud is the evolution of this work, providing a platform where customers can host those apps. “Fermyon Cloud empowers developers to deploy … applications written in a variety of languages (such as Rust, .NET, Go, JavaScript) and experience brilliantly fast performance,” Butcher said. “[A]nyone with a GitHub account can create cloud native WebAssembly applications … The developer self-service paradigm reduces the friction of building applications by making it not only possible but easy for developers to write and test their code in a production-grade environment — and then deploy the finished version to that same hosted environment. Fermyon Cloud lets devs create up to five web apps or microservices and run them in a hosted environment for free. In addition to hosting applications, the service delivers release management, log access and app configuration from a web console. With employees now in Europe, Asia, Australia and North America, Fermyon’s focus is continuing to build out both its open source and commercial projects, Butcher said. Fermyon Cloud will expand into an “enterprise-ready” commercial offering in the coming months, he added, as Fermyon looks to double its 20-person headcount by mid-2023 — emphasizing product, marketing, developer relations and community roles. “We are well-positioned to weather macro-economic storms due to the financing we’re announcing today,” said Butcher while declining to reveal revenue figures. “[We] have funds to last us several years.” To date, Colorado-based Fermyon has raised $26 million.