$3 million: Configu – configuration-as-code platform

No one likes to manage their application’s configuration files, and as systems become more complex and distributed, bugs—and the potential security problems associated with them—can easily multiply. Infrastructure-as-code has become all the rage over the past few years, and now Tel Aviv-based open source developer Configu wants to bring configuration-as-code to the table. to more developers.

The company this week announced a $3 million pre-funding round led by Cardumen Capital. A number of angel investors also participated in this round, including Ariel Myslos, Mark Epstein, Chaim Kopans and Omer Schneider.

The co-founders of the company are Peleg Porat (CEO) and Ran Cohen (CTO). Porat previously worked at companies such as McAfee and F5 Networks, while Cohen was an engineer at startups such as Backand and Testim.io.

“Most of today’s code and software trends lead to an increase in the number of configurations and their complexity, since many technologies – and many niche technologies – are associated with configurations,” Porat explained. “The configuration is extremely complex and fragmented into different files and feature flags, tons of files in git repositories. It’s crazy, leading to misconfiguration after misconfiguration, production downtime, and a host of other problems.”

He noted that a few years ago such a problem did not exist, so no one created a toolkit for managing application configuration. As systems became more complex, enterprises facing similar challenges began to create their own solutions, including the founders of Configu.

“The environment has become more complex – it has become much more distributed, we have Kubernetes, all highly distributed microservices and all that – and then it went from something that could be manually managed a few years ago to something that is simply impossible to manage” – Cohen added.

Configu brings all these application configurations together in a single system. The open source version of Configu for application configurations allows developers to store and organize their configuration data across different environments and systems. Developers can plug it into existing configuration settings—in text files, databases, feature-flagged solutions, or elsewhere—and manage them in a similar way to how they manage infrastructure-as-code solutions. And since it is already code, it can be integrated with test frameworks and automate configuration processes.

Like most open source companies, Configu monetizes its service with a managed cloud version that adds a number of enterprise features such as premium service, single sign-on support, role-based access, and SOC2 compliance on top of the open source version. The company also offers a free community version for small teams that don’t need these features.

“We are making Configu very, very compact,” Porat said. “We believe in community. We have a team in Israel and in the US, and we get support from the community to help us and make changes to the open source. We see great success in this model.”