CloudQuery - Dev First Cloud Asset Inventory
Data Apps are Eating the World
For long time readers of this newsletter, y’all know I am a massive fan of all things software infrastructure especially those solving acute developer pain points. When we first met Yevgeny and Ron, co-founders of Cloudquery, we immediately knew we mutually found a clear fit. Special thanks to Aashay Sanghvi for making the intro!
Imagine if you opened up your phone or laptop and were not able to click on the Applications Launcher to see all the different apps installed on your laptop. How would you know what existed on your laptop, manage what you wanted to keep, what security access those apps had to different systems, and how those apps interact with each other! That’s the current state of the world for developers today.
As the number of services that cloud providers (AWS, GCP, Azure, etc) offer explodes, it is becoming increasingly harder for developers to understand, monitor, and visualize what is in their environment and how these tools are being used. The current solutions used to address these problems are closed-source, proprietary solutions that only work with certain clouds or for siloed use cases. Besides expensive cost and steep learning curves, current legacy products further create issues such as lack of data interoperability, limited API coverage, solutions sprawl, and proprietary query languages. For anyone who’s had to learn a proprietary query language before to use a piece of software…I’m sorry. Life isn’t meant to be lived that way.
Cloud sprawl is only increasing as customers adopt best of breed solutions that all interact together. Getting a handle on this sprawl, securing it and managing it will continue to be a challenge without the right tooling in the hands of developers. Just look at the image below as a small example!
Born from the pain he experienced as a developer, Yevgeny Pats launched CloudQuery as an open source product in early 2021 to solve this problem. CloudQuery is rebuilding all of the proprietary solutions I mentioned above as data apps on top of CloudQuery’s open-source ELT data integration platform. Further more, because the product is open source and highly extensible, the community as well as the company can contribute code & connectors to extend use cases into new areas that current tooling does not even address.
The result is that security and devops engineers get a flexible platform to solve any security, visibility, or cost management use-case with their current data stack, starting from their existing data warehouse/lake to their business intelligence products for monitoring and visualization. CloudQuery meets developers in their existing workflows, requiring no new languages or data stores to be learned. All a developer needs to know is SQL to be able to write queries and start solving their core problems.
Something I and the community are highly excited about is CloudQuery’s recently released Policy Hub. Imagine a library of resources with pre-built queries and templates that a new developer can “walk” into and start using immediately to solve use cases even faster. It’s only been a couple of months but because of CloudQuery’s own work and contribution from developers in the open source community, 500 open source policies have already been built!
Simply put, CloudQuery is shifting left, into the hands of developers, the ability to manage cloud security, cost, and infrastructure by using their existing workflows and tooling.
Today, join me in congratulating the CloudQuery team on their $15M Series A led by Tiger Global! We’re fortunate to have led the seed at boldstart alongside our friends at Haystack, Mango Capital, and Work-Bench.
Read more from TechCrunch’s excellent article here!
