Nobody loves managing configuration files for their applications, and as systems get ever more complex and distributed, errors — and the potential security issues that come with them — can easily multiply. Infrastructure-as-code has gone mainstream over the course of the last few years, and now Tel Aviv–based open source startup Configu wants to bring configuration-as-code for application management to more developers as well.
The company this week announced a $3 million pre-seed funding round, led by Cardumen Capital. A number of angel investors, including Ariel Maislos, Marc Epstein, Haim Kopans and Omer Schneider, also participated in this round.
The company was co-founded by Peleg Porat (CEO) and Ran Cohen (CTO). Porat previously worked at the likes of McAfee and F5 Networks, while Cohen was previously an engineer at startups like Backand and Testim.io.
“Most of the current trends in the code and software domain increase the number of configurations and their complexity because many technologies — and many niche technologies — are around configuration,” Porat explained. “It’s so complex and so fragmented across secret managers and feature flags, tons of files across git repositories. It’s crazy and leads to misconfiguration after misconfiguration, leading to downtime in production and lots of other issues.”
He noted that a few years ago, this wasn’t really an issue, so nobody created the tooling for application configuration management. As their systems became more complex, enterprises that now ran into these issues started to build their own DIY solutions, including the Configu founders.
“The environment became more complex — it’s much more distributed, we’ve got Kubernetes, we’ve got all highly distributed microservices and all that — and then it went from something that was sort of manageable manually a few years ago to something that was just not manageable anymore,” Cohen added.
Configu brings all of these application configuration settings under a single umbrella. The open source version of Configu’s configuration-as-code for application configurations allows developers to store and orchestrate their configuration data across environments and systems. Developers can connect it to their existing configuration settings — whether that’s in a text file, database, feature flag solution or elsewhere and manage it similar to how they would handle their infrastructure-as-code solutions. And because it is now code, they can integrate it with their test frameworks and automate their configuration workflows, too.
Like most open source companies, Configu is monetizing its service with a managed cloud version that adds a number of enterprise features like premium service, single sign-on support, role-based access and SOC2 compliance on top of the open source version. The company also offers a free community version for small teams that don’t need these features.
“We keep Configu very, very lean,” Porat said. “We believe in community. We have a team in Israel and in the Bay Area and we’re getting support from the community who help us and contribute code to the open source. We see a lot of success with this model.”
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