Your developers are being asked to do too much

We’re announcing a $15M Series A funding and OpsLevel’s vision for accelerating software teams with developer portals.

We’ve slowed down and burned out our dev teams

I started working at Amazon in 2006, right before AWS was launched. Since then cloud computing has made it so much easier to start a software company.

Imagine if all the IaaS and PaaS tools that we take for granted today didn’t exist - you’d be building everything from first principles.

So we should be living in the golden era of shipping scalable software, with cloud primitives quickly assembling together like legos. Then why has shipping software only gotten harder?

Two important trends are putting the brakes on dev teams:

 
• The rise of microservices in parallel with the rise of DevOps has pushed operational complexity to dev teams. So your developers have become operators - but in a massively more complicated machine.
 
• The rise of Shift Left and DevSecOps is asking developers to do even more - be experts at operations, observability, testing, and security.

Don’t blindly Shift-Left

At OpsLevel, we care deeply about Service Ownership and so do believe in the ethos of developer autonomy that underlies these trends. Developers have the most context for their software and it shouldn’t be wasted.

But Shifting Left and DevSecMLFinOps are nightmares without automation and guardrails to ease the burden on developers.

Platform Teams to the rescue?

To better support these newly empowered (cough encumbered) developers, central-platform-style teams  - Platform, SRE, DevX - have emerged with a dual mandate:

 
• Help developers build software quickly
 
• Help developers keep the site reliable and secure

But most platform teams are stretched too thin to fulfill these mandates.

The explosion of tech and tooling means platform teams are saddled with supporting diverse tech stacks and coping with tool sprawl–or pushing the boulder of “standardization” uphill.  And without support -  automation and guardrails - developers are struggling too.

Speed Wins

Eng leadership knows that shipping great software is competitive. Eng teams need to move faster and work more efficiently to have an advantage–and win.

The challenge: moving quickly without driving burnout and turnover - or compromising reliability and security.

The Developer Portal: The Cornerstone of Modern Engineering Orgs

If engineering teams are going to reach that golden era of shipping scalable, reliable, secure software, we need a better solution.

 The answer is a developer portal: a single interface for engineering organizations to interact with all of their services, systems, and tools.

With an internal developer portal:

Developers get sensible defaults or templates for rote but important work like:

• creating new services
• provisioning infrastructure   
• finding and using documentation
• instrumenting services for observability
• configuring vulnerability scanners

Platform teams get an extensible tool for encoding best practices and patterns, driving tech upgrades, and tracking compliance

Leadership gets increased stability and alignment across their organization, plus a clearer picture of technical and organizational performance

Service Catalog is just the start

Today, OpsLevel is the best way to organize and manage microservices at scale. We help customers like Outreach, Auth0, and Podium (among others) to:

1. Build a complete, up-to-date catalog of their existing software architecture
2. Drive service maturity, through adoption of their eng best practices
3. Prepare to respond swiftly to the unexpected (like the next log4j bombshell

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But this is just the tip of the iceberg. Companies have even more aspirational goals. They want a unified interface for seamlessly creating and interacting with any resource or tool necessary to build, ship, and run great software.

OpsLevel’s Developer Portal

We’re doubling down on building the best developer portal to help engineering teams ship products faster, with less burden. It’s an ambitious mission, but one we’re fully committed to.

That’s why we’re pleased to announce that we’ve raised $15M in Series A funding led by Threshold Ventures, with participation from Vertex Ventures, S28 Capital, Webb Investment Network, and a number of angel investors, including:

• Grant Miller (CEO and co-founder of Replicated)
• Andrew Peterson, Zane Lackey, and Nick Galbreath (co-founders of Signal Sciences)
• Luca Martinetti (CTO and co-founder of TrueLayer)
• Andrew Miklas (CTO and co-founder of PagerDuty)
• Maynard Webb (COO of eBay)
• Yuri Sagalov (CEO and co-founder of AeroFS/Redbooth)
• Ben Vinegar and David Hayes (VPs of Engineering & Product at Sentry)
• Evan Weaver (CTO and co-founder of Fauna)
• Emily Kramer and Kathleen Estreich (MKT1 Capital & former VPs of Marketing at Carta & Scalyr)
• Aaron Rankin (CTO and co-founder of Sprout Social)

If you’re interested in joining the team on our mission to build the best developer portal, check out our open roles.

John Laban and Ken Rose are co-founders of OpsLevel. John was previously PagerDuty’s first engineer and the pair of them bring senior technical expertise from Shopify, Amazon, and more.  They’ve spent the last decade scaling engineering teams and helping them transition to DevOps and service ownership.