He was the eighth employee hired at payments platform Stripe Inc. in 2011 and watched as the business grew to earn a $20 billion valuation in less than a decade. But for Anurag Goel, founder and chief executive officer of Render Services Inc., one thing that didn’t change was the repetitive nature of his work as a developer.

“Every single time I had to do the same things over and over again,” said Goel (pictured, left). “Despite advancements in the cloud, it was a lot of repetitive work. I decided that we needed to automate some of the new things that had come about as part of how the regular application deployment process evolved, and that’s how Render was born.”

Goel spoke with Stu Miniman, host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio. He was joined by Steve Herrod (right), managing director at the venture capital firm General Catalyst, and they discussed Render’s support in the application deployment process, customer growth, enhanced security and plans for global expansion.

‘Easiest’ cloud provider

Goel’s interest in automating elements of the application deployment process led to the creation of its company motto to be “the easier cloud provider for developers and startups.” Render is seeking to provide an alternative to both large cloud infrastructure providers and platform-as-a-service solutions by offering intuitive hosting without requiring knowledge of servers and infrastructure.

“Don’t forget, the only reason any infrastructure exists is to run applications,” Herrod said. “With Render, we found a way to make it super-easy to deploy and run. It really starts with developers loving the platform, and that’s been Anurag’s obsession since I met him.”

Barely one year after launch, Render has the evidence to show that developers indeed like what they see. The company announced last month that it served more than 1 billion HTTP requests in April, more than double what it served in March.

And the company is also attracting customers. In addition to Stripe, Render provided its services to the presidential campaign of Pete Buttigieg in 2019 and 2020 until the former mayor of South Bend, Indiana, abandoned his quest for the White House.

“They could not or did not want to deal with the complexity inherent in today’s standard infrastructure providers,” Goel recalled. “They moved all of their infrastructure over to Render and were able to service billions of requests over the next few months on our platform.”

Reducing risk

Whether it involves a campaign for the White House or a small startup, security remains a constant concern for developers and infrastructure managers alike. Render’s answer is that by removing complexity from the application deployment process, risk is being reduced as well.

“Security is the bane of DevOps; it’s the slowest part of any deployment,” Herrod said. “They key thing is to get rid of the complexity since complexity and human error are the number one security problems. If you’re only bringing up and taking down pieces of the application as needed, they’re not there to be hacked or attacked.”

Render is in the process of expanding its footprint outside of the U.S. The company just announced early access to its first hosting region in Europe and has plans to grow operations in other parts of the world, according to Goel.

“We have to make sure we make compute accessible to everyone, not just in the U.S. and Europe, but in other places,” Goel said. “We’re looking forward to expanding in Asia, to expanding in South America and even Africa. You can even say: ‘Look, I just want my application to run in these four regions across the globe, so you figure out how to do it.’ And we will.”

Here’s the complete video interview, one of many CUBE Conversations from SiliconANGLE and theCUBE:

Photo: SiliconANGLE