About a year ago, one of my co-founders flew out to a web-scaler client. The client had a huge cloud deployment and was experiencing failure in their production. After a week of debugging, during which the ops team was unable to determine the root cause, they were so desperate that they shut down parts of their environment to figure out where the fault was and what it was affecting. After long days of desperation, frustration, and hair-pulling, the issue was discovered to be a misconfiguration in multiple areas of the deployment.

This event kicked off a deep research project centered around the issues that operations teams face in their production environments and then we decided to tackle the hardest problems head-on.

We had previously worked with Tier 1 companies and large enterprises across various verticals. At those companies, we repeatedly saw production failures caused by new infrastructure deployments and updates in all areas of their stacks.

Tier 2 companies need trustworthy infrastructure too

These Tier 1 companies tackled such issues by developing in-house solutions to predict the outcome of every change. But Tier 2 companies and enterprises don't have these resources and end up using whatever is available.

The thing is, the more dependencies you've got, the more that can go wrong, and the higher the cost will be when critical business operations fail or payments stop. But even when problems are detected using currently available reactive tactics that provide indications post-impact, such as monitoring solutions, the damage is already done.

The great agility created by new technologies and the DevOps culture has brought with it more complexities to our software & systems:

• Microservices - Add new complexities as they require more configurations
• Multi-Cloud - Multi/Hybrid Cloud adoption creates cross deployment operation complexities
• Infrastructure-as-Code(IaC) - Has become increasingly complex and highly nested
• There’s a troubling shortage of experienced DevOps engineers

Since we started really delving into the issue, we’ve spoken to dozens of operators with varying backgrounds, ranging from DevOps to Infrastructure, to SRE, to VPs of IT, and CIOs in companies that have large scale production environments. We have spoken to organizations whose environments are based on hybrid cloud architectures and companies who run their entire operation in the public cloud. The following were the responses we heard time and time again when we asked about their cloud infrastructure environment:

"We spend hundreds of late-night hours fixing failures."

"It takes a village to maintain a highly available production environment."

"Our cloud configuration is highly nested. It is difficult for us to reliably review and test."

"Our infrastructure is too complicated."

"Our DevOps team is short-staffed; I can't hire enough people to manage what we have."

And it became apparent that it’s simply not possible for DevOps teams to predict all the potential problems that can occur across all possible dependencies as infrastructure is updated and deployed.

To prevent potential down-time in a complex system, we need a proactive approach.

Introducing Lightlytics - Deploy & Run Cloud Infrastructure with Confidence

We have built a platform that enables DevOps to Automatically predict, pre-empt and prevent downtime, data loss, deployment delays and other critical business disruption caused by infrastructure changes by simulating all possible dependencies and their impact on operations before deployment, we can proactively ensure that production continues as planned, so you can create assurance in your infrastructure.

With Lightlytics, you get:

1. Confident Development Planning - Automatically identify potential obstacles or conflicts between resources, entities, or services involved in any new requirements. Radically reduce both planning and development time by preventing malfunctions at the planning stage, before your development trial & error ping-pong.  
2. Confident Infrastructure Deployment - Simulate every possible dependency to predict all possible outcomes and avoid DevOps nightmares (service interruptions, data loss, and compliance breaches) before deploying new cloud infrastructure functions or updates.  
3. Confident Continuous Operation - Automatically detect the 1st signs of distress caused by unknown interactions or ecosystem changes. Instantly diagnose the root cause to rapidly mitigate and maintain continuous operation of business-critical infrastructure and avoid data loss.
4. Confident Crisis Control - Prevent most infrastructure disasters caused during planning, deployment, and ongoing operations. And when a crisis hits, instantly identify the root cause and optimal solutions and predict any repercussions of required actions to rapidly restore operations, minimize damage, and avoid new problems that mitigation may cause.

Last but not least, we have built an amazing team

When trying to change the way an industry operates, you need people who are open to the possibilities and have the talent and vision to see a better way forward.

We have an amazing team composed of infrastructure experts, with vast experience in building large scale complex systems. Although we come from different backgrounds, we share one goal; helping companies become confident in their infrastructure. As we embark on this exciting journey, I can't imagine a more qualified group of people to tackle this massive undertaking.

In addition, when we started to explore the problem at hand, I consulted with two incredibly knowledgeable and experienced players in cloud funding. Rona Segev is a founding partner at TLV Partners and is one of the most experienced investors in cloud computing out there, and Kobi Samboursky, Co-founder and Managing Partner at Glilot Capital, is an expositional investor who brings strong entrepreneurial experience. Both Rona and Kobi believe in our vision and will be serving as board members. We feel privileged that they will be taking this journey with us.

So are you looking to establish confidence in your infrastructure? If you're ready to proactively ensure you're deploying and running your cloud infrastructure with confidence, we invite you to our early access program or contact me directly or@lightlytics.com