Shipa launches with $3.75 million in seed funding to solve developers’ growing frustrations with developing and deploying cloud-native applications with Kubernetes

Developing, deploying, and managing cloud-native applications has been a challenging task for developers. Cloud-native is an approach to building and running applications that exploits the advantages of the cloud computing delivery model. Cloud-native is about how applications are created and deployed, not where.

Behind every cloud-native application is Kubernetes. Kubernetes is an open-source container-orchestration system for automating computer application deployment, scaling, and management. Kubernetes is a pillar of the open-source ecosystem that drives cloud-native software.

Kubernetes eliminates many of the manual processes involved in deploying and scaling containerized applications. It was originally designed by Google and is now maintained by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation. It aims to provide a “platform for automating deployment, scaling, and operations of application containers across clusters of hosts.” It works with a range of container tools, including Docker.

Also, using Kubernetes is also not without its challenges. With Kubernetes, there is no application-centric way to manage an application throughout its lifecycle. Developers are instead forced to interact with myriad infrastructure components that are technically challenging and eat up time that is more advantageously spent writing code and building products. Enter Shipa, a Silicon Valley tech startup that delivers a unique cloud-native application management framework built for the full application lifecycle. Without Shipa, platform and DevOps teams must also devote significant time – often up to 50% of it – creating custom scripts, YAML files, and Helm charts. Shipa’s application management framework is built to solve developers’ growing frustrations trying to scale Kubernetes across the full application lifecycle.

Today, Shipa announced its launch with $3.75 million in seed funding to solve developers’ growing frustrations with developing and deploying cloud-native applications with Kubernetes. Now with Shipa, developers can deploy their cloud-native applications with no Kubernetes expertise necessary. The round was co-led by Engineering Capital and Jump Capital; advisors include Google’s Kelsey Hightower, Mastercard’s Ken Owens, and Lyft’s Matt Klein.

Founded by CEO Bruno Andrade, Shipa’s founding team has extensive experience from the cloud-native and application delivery space, bringing technical and business leadership experience from CloudBees (Jenkins), VMware, NeuVector, Juniper Networks, and Oracle.

Shipa has developed an application-centric framework that solves these problems across the entire application lifecycle – and with easy integration into existing CI/CD workflows. With Shipa, the infrastructure is completely abstracted away from developers, who can stay focused on code. Importantly, developers get all the benefits of Kubernetes – instantly – without needing to learn Kubernetes.

Shipa automatically creates all required Kubernetes objects and configuration files and deploys them to all clusters requiring them. Importantly, Shipa does this while continuing to provide developers with an application-level context. The infrastructure components never need to be managed since Shipa provides a comprehensive set of out-of-the-box integrations to common tools.

For platform and DevOps engineers, Shipa provides the tools to maintain application availability, continually meet security requirements, and keep developers productive across multiple clusters and providers. Shipa eliminates the need to put resources toward creating and managing a custom PaaS on top of Kubernetes, creating Kubernetes and YAML files, or developing custom scripts to automate application deployment and management. Platform and DevOps engineers can then focus on higher-value work while enabling developers to focus on code for faster application delivery and iteration.

“The idea for Shipa emerged from continued frustrations with the application layer,” said Bruno Andrade, founder and CEO, Shipa. “Like many engineers, we routinely came up against efficiency-crippling challenges to deploying, managing, and iterating cloud-native applications. While there’s been plenty of attention on fixing cloud-native infrastructure, we believe the application layer is just as ripe for innovation.”

Andrade added: “With Shipa, we are redesigning how cloud-native applications are deployed and operated, helping organizations leverage Kubernetes’ benefits faster and at scale. We have taken what developers know are best practices for application delivery on Kubernetes but built them natively into the Shipa framework so that they now become automatically part of every deployment pipeline. There is nothing in the community today solving these challenges and we look forward to developers, platform engineers, and DevOps teams putting Ship to the test.”

Developers, platform engineers, and DevOps teams interested in trying the general availability of Shipa can start here and/or sign up for Shipa’s live webinar with Hightower coming October 22nd.