DEVOPSdigest

Slim.ai launched with its cloud-based DevOps automation platform built specifically for software developers.

It provides new capabilities and streamlined workflows that help developers accelerate and automate the production, operation and management of containerized applications.

“Developers shouldn't need to be experts at the details of container internals, build systems, deployments and infrastructure to deliver and run their cloud-native applications,” said John Amaral, Co-Founder and CEO of Slim.ai. “With Slim.ai, developers can gain control over containerized application size, performance, cost, security and deployment times without specialized knowledge. They can focus on writing great code, maintain high velocity and easily build, run and own their apps with low overhead and effort.”

Slim.ai founders John Amaral, CEO, and Kyle Quest, CTO, experienced first-hand how software developer productivity was declining and saw developers increasingly face challenges to deliver production-grade containerized applications. They conceived Slim.ai to address these challenges by replacing the myriad ad-hoc, proprietary and manual processes and systems that are typically used today by developers and DevOps teams to deliver containerized applications to production.

The key to Slim.ai’s automation is its “application intelligence.” Slim.ai's platform analyzes and understands application composition and behavior by observing and interpreting how containers (and sets of containers) are constructed and run. Application intelligence works by employing a combination of run-time and static container analysis and specialized container build and optimization engines.

The platform offers rich visualizations and analysis that give developers deep insight into containerized applications. It also offers integrated workflows that can automate common container-related tasks such as selecting and building container images, managing container size, removing vulnerabilities and generating security profiles. The platform integrates with CI/CD pipelines, container registries and code repos to access Docker containers and related source-code files as inputs.

The new Slim.ai platform augments and expands the capabilities of the popular open source DockerSlim product. DockerSlim automatically analyzes and optimizes containerized applications greatly reducing the level of effort required by engineers to make containers smaller, secure and production ready.

DockerSlim has new visibility features specifically targeted at analyzing and visualizing container internals, layers and the software that makes up a container. Developers can use these capabilities to rapidly understand, evaluate and improve containers much more quickly and efficiently than currently possible with typical tools and workflows.

Kyle Quest, co-founder and CTO of Slim.ai and creator of DockerSlim, said: “DockerSlim users have been asking for new ways to understand and evaluate containers. They want one tool that offers comprehensive visibility into container composition rather than using manual inspection or a collection of other open source and ad-hoc tools. The new visibility features in DockerSlim provide a comprehensive solution for developers to address these challenges. We are also working on powerful visualizations and analytics in our cloud platform that make the utility of our visibility features even greater.”

Slim.ai raised $6.6 million in seed funding from Boldstart Ventures, Decibel Partners, FXP Ventures and TechAviv Founder Partners. Slim.ai will use this funding to expand DockerSlim’s feature set, support its growing open source developer community and deliver on its core platform.