DEVOPSdigest

Containous closed $10 million in Series A funding.

The round is led by Balderton Capital, with previous investors Elaia and 360 Capital Partners also participating.

Containous simplifies the journey to microservices networking for organizations of all sizes, who use Containous' solutions to ease networking of their cloud applications, microservices, and APIs.

The $10 million Series A will be used to quickly build up and expand Containous' unified and centralized management platform purpose-built for cloud-native applications and microservices. The platform is driven entirely by dy developers and created to function as one single tool that solves networking complexity.

Containous will also significantly increase its engineering and product teams to accelerate product development for the benefit of the wider open source community and for enterprises looking to build, ship, and run applications faster and more efficiently.

"By taking the pain out of network management, we empower application and engineering teams to focus on software development," said Emile Vauge, CEO and co-founder, Containous. "With Containous, users are free to build, iterate, and ship their applications rather than wasting valuable cycles on networking and infrastructure. We want development teams to view networking as a commodity, because that's what it really should be."

"At Balderton, we are very excited about the emergence of organic online communities – and some of the most productive and powerful communities to emerge over the past decade have come from globally decentralized teams collaborating on open source infrastructure software," said Bernard Liautaud, Managing Partner, Balderton Capital. "We believe that being open source is becoming a prerequisite for widely-adopted, high-quality infrastructure software today, and that the most compelling and strategic aspect of open source software is a strong community driving the creation, development and, ultimately, the adoption of that software. The team at Containous has led the massive Traefik community with tremendous success over the last few years, and we are humbled to be joining it. With IDC forecasting that there will be more than 1.8 billion enterprise container instances by 2021, we anticipate Containous will increasingly play a very meaningful – and welcome – role in developers' workflows. We look forward to playing an active role in the community as Containous continues to evolve its core product, Traefik, alongside its newer releases (Maesh and TraefikEE) to transform networking for businesses, developers, and end users around the world."

Containous delivers three solutions for drastically simplifying networking:

- Traefik is the cloud-native edge router that manages inbound connections from the internet to the infrastructure. The open source solution is built to be easy to use, dynamic and automatic, and is integrated with all major cloud-native tools and orchestrators. Traefik is designed from the ground-up for microservices and containers.

- TraefikEE is the production-grade and distributed version of Traefik developed for – and trusted by – larger enterprises. The EE version splits proxies and contrrollers to increase security, supports cluster deployment through high scalability and availability, and includes a dashboard, operations tools, and bundled 24/7 support.

- Maesh is a very easy to use (but feature-rich) service mesh built on top of Traefik that is capable of managing service-to-service communications inside a Kubernetes cluster with a non-invasive and per-node design (as opposed to side-car proxy architectures). The solution is SMI-compliant.
Containous' Series A infusion comes at a time of explosive growth for the networking company.

"Enterprise IT is undergoing a major revolution, driven by Cloud and Edge computing and by DevOps practices," said Marc Rougier, Partner, Elaia. "Containous' mission is to develop best of breed, open source, end-to-end solutions to serve Enterprise networking needs within this new technological context. At Elaia we invested early in Containous, convinced by Emile Vauge's vision and impressed by the exceptionally fast adoption of their initial product, Traefik. Two years later, Containous has crushed the 1 billion downloads barrier, delivered to top customers around the world, and extended its product portfolio. We are very proud to now partner with Balderton to tackle the next phase of Containous' scale up."