We have two things that we’re pretty excited to share today:
- We’re announcing €3.1 million in seed funding as we continue on our mission to reinvent development workflows for the Kubernetes and cloud native era.
- Garden Enterprise, our development automation platform for teams, is now generally available.
If that’s all you needed to hear, and you’d like to set up time to talk, let’s schedule something!
Otherwise, read on for the full scoop.
Announcing €3.1 Million in Seed Funding
We’re fortunate to work with a wonderful group of investors. We owe them a big thanks for their support on our journey so far.
Our seed funding was led by Crowberry Capital with participation from byFounders. Pre-seed funding was led by Fly Ventures, and included System.One, Tiny.vc, as well as angels Renaud Visage (founder, Eventbrite), Chad Fowler (former GM Developer Advocacy, Microsoft), Olivier Pomel (CEO, Datadog), David Helgason (founder, Unity), Nat Friedman (CEO, GitHub), Hampus Jakobsson (General Partner, Pale Blue Dot), and Thomas Köhl (former COO, Orderbird).
We’d also like to say thank you to our users, who have also provided a huge amount of support and input over the past couple of years.
They’ve also shared their Garden success stories, and there’s nothing that gets us more excited than hearing a user’s Garden success story.
Here’s one example. Mitchell Friedman, a software engineer at OakNorth Bank, told us:
- “We use Garden to provide more than 50 engineers with an isolated development environment in a shared Kubernetes cluster. Our team can develop their microservices remotely and more quickly test changes and iterate on their services in a production-like environment.
- “Garden also powers our continuous integration pipeline, where we run all of our image builds, unit, and integration tests. Sharing cached results for images and tests reduces cycle time for developing features and getting our work merged and ready to release.”
We love this use case because it touches on so many things we believe are critical for effective Kubernetes development:
- Production-like environments for devs in a cluster, not on their laptops
- Frequent testing and rapid iteration, even when working on a large and complex application
- Consistency between development and CI, and using Garden to bring the two environments as close together as possible
- Enabling large teams to operate efficiently, and making it possible to share resources while minimizing complexity
On that note, if you have a Garden use case you’re willing to share, we’d love to hear about it. Drop us a line—our DMs are open.
Garden Enterprise Goes GA
And that’s not all: we’re also announcing that Garden Enterprise, our development automation platform for teams, is now generally available.
We first mentioned Garden Enterprise in June 2020, when we opened up a limited early access program to collect feedback on the product from a handful of users. After another few months of testing and hardening, we’re ready to move Garden Enterprise from early access to general availability.
Garden Enterprise is built on top of the open source Garden Core and enables organizations to quickly and securely roll out Garden to development teams. With Garden Enterprise, organizations can:
- Reduce operating cost and resource waste by automatically halting unused environments and resources. One of the problems we hear often from our users is that development and testing hardware is used inefficiently, resulting in wasted costs. And one report puts a number on it: 44% of cloud compute is used for non-production environments, which are used 40 hours a week yet accrue 168 hours per week in costs.
- Simplify developer onboarding by centrally provisioning and managing keys for different environments and individual users. As organizations around the globe go remote, secure and efficient employee onboarding becomes a critical capability. We’ve written in the past about how a platform like Garden can make it easier to onboard new team members, and Garden Enterprise is built with this at top of mind.
- Automatically start and tear down preview environments for pull requests, to enable both developer and non-developer stakeholders to see and interact with a production-like replica of the application before pushing to production. We’re increasingly hearing reports of not only devs but also product managers spinning up Garden preview environments so they can interact with a working version of an application for QA and acceptance testing. We believe that preview environments can play a huge role in collaboration for teams building cloud native applications.
- Gain a central view of all environments and log all activity in one place. We know of plenty of organizations where tens or even hundreds of developers are interacting with Garden environments. In those instances, a centralized control pane is crucial.
What’s next?
If you’d like to learn more about Garden Enterprise, feel free to reach out to schedule time to talk. We’d be happy to set something up.
To get started with the open source Garden Core, check out our documentation.
If you have questions, let us know! Our community Slack channel is the best way for our open source users to get support.
And we look forward to growing our team across all departments in the coming months, so if you’re interested in what we’re doing, take a look at our current openings.
Thanks for reading, and we’ll be back with another update soon.
Photo by Myriam Zilles on Unsplash.
