Startup: HashiCorp
What they do: Provide software that manages the application delivery process on any infrastructure.
Headquarters: San Francisco, CA 
CEO: Mitchell Hashimoto. While still in college, this 25-year-old entrepreneur created Vagrant, a tool for building and distributing development environments. Today, Vagrant is used by millions of people worldwide, from individuals to the Fortune 500. Prior to HashiCorp, Mitchell started and sold another automation-focused business. He also spent five years as a web developer and another four as an operations engineer.
Founded: 2012
Funding: Yesterday, HashiCorp announced that it has locked down a $10 million Series A round from Mayfield, GGV Capital and True Ventures.
Problem they tackle: Application delivery is an increasingly complex problem. Today, applications run everywhere from public clouds to private clouds to physical servers to virtualized servers, in containers, and in hybrid combinations of these. As more operations choices are added to the data center, whether through a growing development team, company acquisitions, or general technical debt, managing complexity between legacy and new systems becomes a nightmare.
But the end goal is still the same — safely and consistently deploy an application on any infrastructure. To accomplish this goal, development teams often build custom application delivery solutions that are time-consuming, expensive, and error-prone. Faced with a build-or-buy situation, organizations are forced to build, which can take up to a year of development time, since a buy option usually isn’t available.
Please Tweet: Startup HashiCorp Launches, Tames App Delivery & Management Process
What I like about them: HashiCorp’s Atlas software gives users a unified dashboard and consistent workflow for developing, deploying, and maintaining applications on any public, private, or hybrid infrastructure. Developers and operators get a unified view to manage and provide visibility for servers, containers, VMs, configuration management, service discovery, and additional operations services.
Atlas works with such VMs and containers as VMware, Virtualbox, Docker, and Rocket, as well as with configuration management tools like Puppet and Chef.
HashiCorp argues that companies that adopt Atlas will be protected against future infrastructure paradigm shifts, since Atlas focuses on common, high-level workflows that are generic to application delivery across any system. DevOps teams can configure an application in Atlas and deploy it on Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Compute Engine (GCE), Heroku, DigitalOcean, OpenStack, Azure, and more.
Customers: Atlas is currently in beta. Its development builds on the work the HashiCorp team has done to build and launch five successful open source projects – Vagrant, Packer, Serf, Consul, and Terraform – that together have more than one million cumulative downloads. These projects are being used by the likes of AOL, Disqus, Twitch, Lithium Technologies, Expedia, and Mozilla.
Atlas integrates those other open source software elements into a more complete DevOps software suite.
Please Tweet: Startup HashiCorp Raises $10 Million to Streamline App Delivery Management
Competitive Landscape: There are plenty of app delivery solutions that behemoths like Google have developed and now use internally. The most direct competition in the open market probably comes from VMware’s vSphere, but I wouldn’t be surprised to see less direct competitors, such as, perhaps, ScienceLogic, getting into the fray, since something like this aligns with what they already do.
Moreover, with key elements already available as open-source projects, DIYers may skip the complete package in favor of piecing together their own alternatives. I also won’t be surprised if new, competing management consoles built on top of Vagrant, Packer, and various other open-source tools hit the market too.
Other indirect competitors who could enter the fray include Barracuda, CA, and BMC.
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