“Infrastructure-as-code” startup envZero Inc. is launching its self-service cloud management platform in beta today after securing $3.3 million in funding.

The round was led by Boldstart Ventures and Grove Ventures, while Guy Podjarny of Snyk Ltd. participated as an angel investor.

Env0, as the company is known, has high hopes for its platform, which offers both cloud management and governance capabilities for Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure that help to ease bottlenecks in application development.

Infrastructure-as-code refers to the idea of managing and provisioning computer servers an other resources via machine-readable definition files, as opposed to physical hardware configuration or the use of interactive configuration tools. The concept has become popular since the shift to microservices, which are the components of modern applications, and cloud-native information technology architectures.

Infrastructure-as-a-code frameworks help to ease some of the inefficiency problems that arise from dealing with finite cloud infrastructure resources. But env0 Chief Executive Officer Ohad Maislish said IaC frameworks often cause bottlenecks in continuous integration/continuous development pipelines that can be a big source of frustration for developers.

Env0 helps DevOps teams to overcome these bottlenecks by moving application testing, development and production workloads into standalone, ephemeral environments. “Env0 reduces inefficiency by creating an engine that simplifies IaC governance while increasing accessibility of self-service infrastructure, doing for infrastructure-as-code what GitHub does for Git,” Maislish said.

The platform enables cloud users to spin up “dynamic environments” that contain all of the components needed to quickly launch their applications, and view and control these through a simple and intuitive user interface. That helps eliminate the problem of “phantom workloads” that are easily forgotten about. The service also provides automatic shutdown and time-to-live options to ensure workloads don’t remain idle and consume user’s budgets.

Governance controls are another key feature of env0’s platform. It offers a centralized interface from which admins can manage user’s passwords, security keys and tokens, and enable role-based access controls.

In addition, env0’s platform can help users to keep a lid on cloud costs. Rather than relying on estimations or manual tagging, the company said, it allows teams to connect their cloud spend to existing projects by automatically tagging infrastructure, even across multiple cloud providers.

Env0 said its platform is now free to use in public beta. Officials said the company will use its initial funding to accelerate development of the platform, with an eye to making it generally available later in the year. In addition, the company is planning to open a second headquarters, this one in Silicon Valley.

Image: env0