Distelli Raises $2.8 Million for App Deployment as a Service Platform

Sean Michael

Updated · Jan 20, 2015

As organizations of all sizes increasingly look to the cloud as a deployment and delivery model for applications, the demand for services to make cloud deployments easier is also growing. It’s a demand that startup Distelli is hoping to help fill with its infrastructure automation technology.

Today Distelli announced its Series A funding round of $2.8 million, led by Andreessen Horowitz, to help build out its technology platform to take advantage of the growing market opportunity. Distelli was founded by Rahul Singh, who previously spent nine years working at Amazon Web Services (AWS).

“Distelli is an agent-based service,” Singh told Enterprise Apps Today. “Customers install the agent and then are able to be up and running deploying code to the cloud via the web.”

Essentially, Distelli is a deployment as a service company that leverages a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) cloud backend to manage the agents. Singh said that Distelli is about managing code on servers, providing a DevOps dashboard that enables users to see and manage their application infrastructure.

From a competitive landscape, there are multiple tools in the market today, including Puppet and Chef, that are often used to help deploy and configure applications. Puppet and Chef are sometimes grouped into a class of technology known as orchestration, but that’s not quite what Singh is trying to do with Distelli.

“Orchestration is an overloaded term. We like to think of Distelli as a DevOps dashboard, a single view for all your infrastructure,” Singh said.

Singh added that so far Distelli has not had any customers use Puppet alongside Distelli, although Chef usage is a use-case that he has seen.

“Puppet, just like Chef, is just another infrastructure provisioning tool,” Singh said. “It makes a lot of sense to use Puppet to bootstrap your software and machines, put Distelli on them and hand that off to the engineering team.”

Distelli will also work alongside AWS’ CloudFormations orchestration and template service as well. Singh explained that people use CloudFormation templates to pull infrastructure together. The Distelli agent can be injected into those templates, such that when AWS servers are launched, the agent starts up and registers with the Distelli console.

“So you get the best of both worlds, using CloudFormation templates to start the provisioning and you get the Distelli agent so once it’s running you can manage it all,” Singh said.

So for an AWS customer, for example, once servers are up and running, Distelli can be used to update the servers with code fixes as needed.

Distelli is also able to work alongside Docker containers, which have become an increasingly popular form of application virtualization technology over the course of the last year. Singh noted that there is still a need for a technology to move application containers onto servers, and users need to have visibility.

“Distelli complements Docker, with visibility into where the application containers are running as well as letting users start, stop and upgrade them,” Singh explained.

Moving forward, Singh said the focus is on customers and adding more features.

“Our vision is that you should be able to use Distelli with your existing infrastructure and your code without requiring any code changes,” Singh said. “

Sean Michael Kerner is a senior editor at Enterprise Apps Today and InternetNews.com. Follow him on Twitter @TechJournalist

Sean Michael
Sean Michael

Sean Michael is a writer who focuses on innovation and how science and technology intersect with industry, technology Wordpress, VMware Salesforce, And Application tech. TechCrunch Europas shortlisted her for the best tech journalist award. She enjoys finding stories that open people's eyes. She graduated from the University of California.

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