Startup Komodor Ltd., whose technology enables developers to fix issues in their companies’ software container environments faster, today launched from stealth mode and marked the milestone by revealing that it has closed a $25 million round of funding.

The funding follows a wave of startup acquisitions in the Kubernetes tooling market.

Accel led Komodor’s $25 million round. The venture capital firm was joined by a half-dozen angel investors, including the chief technology officers of Atlassian Corp. PLC and Microsoft Corp.’s GitHub.

Tel Aviv-based Komodor has developed a platform that promises to shorten the amount of time necessary to fix malfunctions in Kubernetes-powered software container clusters. Kubernetes is the go-to platform for managing containers in the enterprise. A rapidly growing number of enterprises are adopting the technology, which is creating more demand for tools that can make managing it simpler.  

Komodor sees an especially big opportunity for simplification in the process of troubleshooting Kubernetes. Production container environments are so complex that, when there’s a malfunction, developers must typically use multiple tools to find the cause. According to Komodor, its platform eliminates the need to use multiple products by consolidating the troubleshooting workflow in one centralized hub, which streamlines the workflow. The result, Komodor claims, is that technical issues can be resolved faster. 

Komodor says that its platform saves time in other ways as well. Malfunctions in container environments are often the result of a change to the deployment, such as the release of a software update containing a bug. In other words, the faster developers can identify recent changes to the environment, the sooner they can fix issues. Komodor provides a set of features specifically designed for finding such modifications.

The startup’s platform displays a visual timeline of the recent changes to a containerized application, including changes to both the application’s code and its configuration settings. The feature promises to speed up troubleshooting by sparing developers the time-consuming task of manually sifting through error logs. In the same spirit, Komodor specifically highlights the modifications that are most likely to have caused a technical issue. 

Containerized applications are typically implemented as a collection of separate but interconnected components each running in a different container. There are situations where a component may encounter technical issues not because of an internal malfunction, but because of an issue with a different component on which it depends to run. For such scenarios, Komodor generates a visualization of how different parts of an application depend on one another that developers can consult to trace an issue back to its source. 

“When on-call teams get a PagerDuty alert telling them something’s gone wrong, the first question they ask is ‘What changed,’ and finding the answer often involves logging in to multiple tools and up to hours of detective work,” said Accel partner Seth Pierrepont. “With Komodor, the response to ‘What changed’ simply becomes ‘Ask Komodor.’”

Komodor co-founder and Chief Technology Officer Itiel Shwartz explained that “this change intelligence comes from a deep integration with Kubernetes, combined with other data points across a developer’s existing stack” of tools.

Technical issues can have a major revenue impact when they crop up in a mission-critical system. An outage in a database that powers a supply chain management application, for example, may interrupt parts of a company’s logistics operations.

As a result, the value proposition of troubleshooting tools such as Komodor’s platform is twofold. They can help developers free up time normally spent on troubleshooting for other tasks, while at the same time reducing the impact of technical errors on a company’s business operations.

Komodor is one of the newest entrants into the growing ecosystem of startups offering tools to make running Kubernetes in production easier. Among the other players are Tigera Inc., which specializes in Kubernetes security, and Weaveworks Inc., whose platform eases configuration tasks.

Several startups, including Pixie Labs, Rancher Labs and Portshift, have already been acquired. The frequent startup exits in the Kubernetes tooling ecosystem are providing more reason for venture capital firms to invest in the segment, which is good news for new market entrants planning to raise funding.

Image: Komodor