Israeli startup ScaleOps Labs Ltd. said today it has raised $21.5 million via two funding rounds to boost the development of what it says is the industry’s first fully automated and cloud-native resource orchestration platform for Kubernetes deployments.

The funding rounds – which consisted of seed and Series A – were led by Lightspeed Venture Partners, NFX and Glilot Capital Partners, and will help the startup to scale a cloud resource management platform that’s said to be able to achieve cost savings of up to 80%, while ensuring better performance for Kubernetes applications.

The open-source Kubernetes container orchestration software sits at the heart of the vast majority of modern software applications today. It’s used to manage the hundreds or even thousands of containers that host the modular components of these apps, and enables developers to update them on a continuous basis, ensuring they can add new functionality almost as fast as they can innovate. However, while Kubernetes is designed to scale DevOps, it struggles to scale itself up.

This is where ScaleOps believes it can make a difference. In its pitch, the company explains that the management of Kubernetes environments is a complex and tedious process that involves lots of manual work. The problem is that Kubernetes configurations, which govern container sizing, scaling thresholds and node type selection, are static. However, consumption and demand is dynamic, fluctuating throughout the day.

As a result, engineering teams are under constant pressure to manually adjust cloud resources for each app, battling to avoid under- or over-provisioning so they can ensure their apps perform as expected while minimizing the overhead costs. They need to perform a delicate balancing act, because if an app has too few resources it will experience performance issues, but if too many resources are devoted to it, companies can waste thousands of dollars paying for idle servers.

ScaleOps co-founder and Chief Executive Yodar Shafrir said the problem is that each application container requires a different scaling strategy. As a result, engineers devote hours trying to predict demand, running load tests and tweaking the configuration files of each container. “It’s impossible to manage this at scale,” he said. “There’s a huge need for a context-aware platform that can optimize these constantly-changing environments automatically, adapting to changes in demand in real-time.”

ScaleOps effectively allows companies to run their Kubernetes workloads on autopilot, continuously adjusting and optimizing the resources they use in real-time, based on the demand each application is experiencing. The software is compatible with any Kubernetes environment, including cloud platforms like Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud, as well as on-premises and air-gapped servers.

The startup said its software works to ensure that resources are provisioned to deliver the optimum performance for each application in real-time, meaning users will no longer waste money on underutilized resources. It uses artificial intelligence algorithms to monitor demand on a continuous basis, which allows it to select the most appropriate node type for each container as well as the required level of resources, further reducing costs.

Shafrir said ScaleOps’ approach, which automates resource management down to the smallest building block, will finally free engineers from the task of constantly reconfiguring their application environments. “By employing AI, the ScaleOps platform is context-aware and autonomously handles resource management, lowering infrastructure costs and delivering better performance,” he insisted.

The startups claims are backed by a number of prominent customers, including Salt Security Inc., Noname Gate Inc. and Wiz Inc., which use its software to automate their production Kubernetes environments.

Ron Tzrouta, cloud finops lead at Wiz, said one of the main benefits of ScaleOps is its ability to ensure better performance during periods of peak demand. “While dramatically reducing our Kubernetes cloud costs, the hands-free automation freed our teams from dealing with ongoing configurations, which is critical in our rapidly ever-growing environment,” he said.

Looking forward, ScaleOps said the funds will be used to fuel its global expansion, with a focus on the U.S. and Europe.

Image: ScaleOps