Copper.io is a small company with big ambitions: It wants to assemble a full set of tools to run and monitor your cloud deployments — regardless of what the underlying cloud infrastructure is.
CEO Ed Byrne thinks there’s a market for a suite to do all of this and looks to the past for his rationale. In the days of client-server computing, big companies — vendors LIKE BMC, CA, IBM (with Tivoli) and HP (with OpenView) — wanted to own the management of all a company’s systems. And then there were dozens of smaller companies with lots of point solutions, most of which got acquired by the big guys, Byrne said.
Now he thinks there’s an opportunity for a smart cloud-first competitor to roll up all the tools needed to run, monitor and manage the stack atop the infrastructure. Copper.io has no plans to compete with Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Windows Azure, Google Compute Cloud or Rackspace (good thinking), but it wants to help you deploy, manage, and monitor your workloads on those clouds.
Toward that end Copper.io has already assembled some products including:
- Cloud Vertical for IaaS cost usage and analytics
- PointHQ for managing DNS services
- Stackful for easing deployment on common frameworks on multiple clouds
- Statsmix for metrics, dashboards and reporting
The first step is to tend to the CARE and feeding of existing customers, which include some name brands like FeedHenry, Glassdoor (for Cloud Vertical); and Sendgrid and Twilio (for Statsmix). Then the company needs to integrate those toolsets, plus some home grown tools, together into a real suite.
As an example of current capabilities, Stackful, offers easy-click deployments to the user’s cloud of choice — well, for now to AWS and Digital Ocean, which just closed $ 3.2 million in funding. Stackful wraps a Heroku-like environment around dozen or more common Chef configurations to enable easy deployment of applications written in Meteor or Node.js (and soon Ruby on Rails) to the cloud. Support for Docker is also planned.
Coming soon to the U.S
Byrne is based out of Dublin now but Copper.io, with 12 employees, is looking to set up shop in the U.S., most likely in the Bay Area. Copper.io, he said, is not in the market for VC funding. “We are self-funded and profitable and we will stay that way, ” he said.
Advisors to the startup include Jonathan Siegel who sold Exceptional Tool Services to Rackspace earlier this year; Lucas Carlson, who founded Appfog and recently sold it to Centurylink/Savvis; and Neil Patel, co founder of KISSmetrics, a web analytics company.
So this is a good idea. But, the risk, as always, is that the big infrastructure providers (heck, let’s just say AWS) keep adding more management and monitoring tools to their own repertoire. That means third parties must keep scrambling to add more value. Still, as non-AWS clouds proliferate, many customers would welcome easy-to-use tools that will let them easily deploy and then keep an eye on their deployments across clouds.
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