The 10 Coolest DevOps Startups Of 2019 (So Far)

These 10 startups are delivering the tools and automation platforms that smooth the way for developers and operations teams to collaborate.

DevOps Delirium

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Shipping software has become a nonstop affair for just about every modern enterprise.

Big releases are no longer the norm. Instead, developers must consistently coordinate their work with operations teams, especially their security specialists, to facilitate the continual pipelines of upgrades and patches required by their organizations.

For those high-velocity software factories, DevOps is standard operating procedure.

In part, successful DevOps practices come down to organization and culture. But initiatives to implement those principles largely depend on adopting the best technologies to enable them.

Innovative startups are delivering the tools and automation platforms that smooth the way for developers and operations teams to collaborate in building high-quality applications, provisioning infrastructure for them to run on, and managing their life cycle in production.

Bonitasoft

CEO: Miguel Valdes Faura

Bonitasoft offers Bonita Continuous Delivery, a Platform as a Service designed to support collaboration efforts between development and operations teams.

The Franco-American developer of digital process automation technology includes tools and methods on its platform that DevOps practitioners can use to automate complex projects and deploy their software rapidly and safely in private or public clouds.

The company recently launched Bonita Cloud, a hosted and fully managed version of the Bonita platform.

CircleCI

CEO: Jim Rose

CircleCI provides a continuous integration and delivery platform that automates the process of building, testing and deploying software at scale.

The San Francisco-based startup's technology for accelerating the release of code for web and mobile apps is now used by more than 600,00 developers across 30,000 organizations that are running more than 30 million jobs per month.

CircleCI recently extended its capabilities into Kubernetes through partnerships with Amazon Web Services, Microsoft, VMware, Red Hat and Kublr. It's also integrating its platform with container registries from AWS, Google, Microsoft and Docker.

Datical

CEO: Derek Hutson

This Austin, Texas, startup specializes in bringing the advances of DevOps automation to the database.

Application releases typically require corresponding changes to databases, which still involve manual and lengthy processes prone to error.

Given the importance of the database in modern application architecture, Datical is focused on introducing CI/CD processes to that technology.

Harness

CEO: Jyoti Bansal

Harness describes its technology as a Continuous-Delivery-as-a-Service platform that helps businesses of all stripes adopt DevOps practices.

The San Francisco startup's technology employs artificial intelligence to automate software deployments, analyze their quality, and roll back releases if problems arise.

Customers using Harness to automate software changes across cloud and container architectures see immediate and stark reductions in deployment times and errors as DevOps teams become far more efficient.

Kasten

CEO: Niraj Tolia

Kasten, based in Los Altos, Calif., provides an enterprise data management offering tailored to the work of DevOps teams deploying micro-services apps across Kubernetes clusters.

The startup's K10 Platform looks to solve the problems of managing data in a micro-services world. It handles backup, recovery and migration of large data stores across public and private Kubernetes deployments. That makes it easier for DevOps teams to introduce stateful containerized applications at scale.

Kublr

CEO: Slava Koltovich

Kublr has developed a container management platform geared to ease the deployment and management of modern apps across cloud environments.

The Washington, D.C.-based startup enables enterprises to run Kubernetes clusters independent of underlying clouds, platforms, operating systems or technology stacks. That pluggable architecture along with built-in security, backup and disaster recovery and monitoring capabilities makes Kublr a popular choice for enterprises adopting DevOps methods.

Platform.sh

CEO: Frederic Plais

This startup born in France takes a Platform-as-a-Service approach to helping DevOps teams accelerate their software delivery pipelines.

Among its capabilities, Platform.sh allows developers to clone their applications on its platform so they can test new features and fixes in real time before releasing them into production.

Platform.sh will manage code, connected to databases and dependent services, that developers run in the startup's hosted environment. Software vendors can also white-label the platform when introducing their own cloud-based services.

Pulumi

CEO: Joe Duffy

This Seattle-based startup offers technology that helps cloud engineers deploy code rapidly and collaboratively in the cloud.

By leveraging Pulumi's infrastructure-as-code platform, developers, operators and teams can push their applications faster and safer into production environments.

The company recently released Pulumi Crosswalk for AWS. That Software-as-a-Service offering allows DevOps teams to automate application deployment on Amazon's cloud infrastructure using software development kits.

Spotinst

CEO: Amiram Shachar

Spotinst has particularly focused on making its technology for provisioning cloud infrastructure at optimal cost geared for the work of DevOps teams.

The Israeli-American startup uses artificial intelligence to identify the best deals on cloud infrastructure made available through reserved and spot instances offered by the hyper-scale providers.

For DevOps teams to take advantage of those deals, Spotinst has integrated with popular CI/CD tools. And the company's flagship product, Ocean, enables the provisioning of serverless Kubernetes clusters of the kind favored by DevOps practitioners to build micro-services applications across clouds.

XebiaLabs

CEO: Derek Langone

The Burlington, Mass.-based DevOps specialist focuses on empowering enterprise developers with continuous delivery software tools.

In March, XebiaLabs launched its DevOps Prediction Engine, which delivers a "weather forecast" for software delivery.

The machine-learning service delivers predictive risk analytics to warn DevOps teams of pitfalls in the software development pipeline. The service flags potential bottlenecks in the process, giving engineers time to take preventative actions, adjust timelines and keep business leaders informed of their progress.