The serverless computing company Stackery this week closed on a new round of funding and launched a health-monitoring dashboard for serverless deployments.
The Portland, Oregon-based firm pocketed $5.5 million in new funding, which pushed its total haul to more than $7.3 million since it was founded in 2016. The latest round was led by HWVP with additional participation from Voyager Capital, Pipeline Capital Partners, and Founders’ Co-op.
“We saw a lot of appetite in the market, which I think is just reflective of the market itself for serverless,” said Nate Taggart, co-founder and CEO at Stackery. “We are seeing near parity with containers in terms of enterprise adoption, and the fundraising reflected that.”
Taggart’s perhaps bold statement was echoed by a recent blog post from Redmonk analyst Fintan Ryan, who wrote that he has heard of enterprise developers looking to bypass work on container platforms and move straight to serverless architectures “for suitable applications.”
“We expect this trend to pick up pace over the coming 12 to 18 months, but with various teething problems as developers adopt to this new paradigm and reach decisions on what programming languages and frameworks they find to be productive,” Ryan wrote.
Stackery plans to use the funding infusion to grow its business into the enterprise space.
“Last year we were focused on engineering the platform,” Taggart said. “This year is about building the commercial side of the business; putting in place a go-to-market team that will allow us to land within an organization and then be able to spread throughout that organization.”
Stackery’s funding news comes on the heels of Israeli-based serverless performance monitoring company Epsagon completing a $4.1 million seed round. The company’s platform uses artificial intelligence (AI) for performance monitoring of serverless architectures. This allows users to uncover potential performance issues before they occur.
Health Metrics Dashboard
Stackery also this week released its Health Metrics Dashboard that provides visibility into the health of serverless applications. This includes different tiers of distributed applications and allows users to drill down to individual resources for deeper diagnostic monitoring.
The platform basically provides an architectural map of an organization’s operations using insight from an Amazon Web Services (AWS) Lambda deployment. This allows for the ability to track bottlenecks over the entire application lifecycle.
“AWS Lambda already provides a lot of this insight, but it’s difficult to match that data to what is actually happening in a deployment,” Taggart said. “It’s about turning that data into that a-ha moment for an enterprise.”
He explained that Stackery’s approach was different from other serverless monitoring platforms from companies like IOpipe, which is focused more on code level performance, and Epsagon, which is more a distributed tracing product.
The health dashboard is being offered on its own running on the data pumped out from AWS, or it can be integrated with Stackery’s Serverless Operations Console that it launched last year. That product is designed to “operationalize” the use of serverless in enterprise environments. This is done through a set of software tools that provide developers with increased control over serverless deployments in a production-grade environment.
Moving Beyond AWS
AWS’ Lambda continues to be central to most work around the serverless computing ecosystem. AWS recently pushed its Serverless Application Repository platform to general availability. Taggart noted that AWS has about a year head start in terms of building out its serverless support.
He said that while AWS remains the most mature among large cloud providers, he was seeing robust growth among other providers. Other serverless computing options in the space include platforms from Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform, and IBM OpenWhisk.
“Azure is doing a lot of great work in serverless,” Taggart said. “We have a relationship with them and are looking to build support on that platform. It really adds an important element to the ecosystem.”
He also noted that Microsoft’s embedded relationship with the retail sector, which is driving a lot of the serverless deployments, is also helping its cause and is something that Amazon lacks. Microsoft also has a history of offering development tools that bodes well for its serverless aspirations.
The other cloud providers are also making progress. Taggart noted that Google, for instance, has a “beta” tag on its serverless platform that, once lifted, should spark more work in that ecosystem.
Redmonk’s Ryan said his research had shown that a majority of serverless application workloads are being run on Lambda. Microsoft’s Azure Functions is also getting some attention with Google’s Cloud Functions “running a distant third.”