SANTA CLARA, Calif. – October 8, 2020 – Shipa, Corp., delivering a unique cloud native application management framework built to manage the full application lifecycle, is launching today with $3.75M in seed funding. The round is co-led by Engineering Capital and Jump Capital; advisors include Google's Kelsey Hightower, Mastercard's Ken Owens, and Lyft's Matt Klein.

Developers, platform engineers, and DevOps teams interested in trying the general availability of Shipa can start here and/or sign up for Shipa's live webinar with Hightower coming October 22nd.

With Kubernetes, there is no application-centric way to manage an application throughout its lifecycle. Developers are instead forced to interact with myriad infrastructure components that are technically challenging and eat up time that is more advantageously spent writing code and building products. Without Shipa, platform and DevOps teams must also devote significant time – often up to 50% of it – creating custom scripts, YAML files, and Helm charts.

Shipa has developed an application-centric framework that solves these problems across the entire application lifecycle – and with easy integration into existing CI/CD workflows. With Shipa, the infrastructure is completely abstracted away from developers, who can stay focused on code. Importantly, developers get all the benefits of Kubernetes – instantly – without needing to learn Kubernetes. Shipa automatically creates all required Kubernetes objects and configuration files, and deploys them to all clusters requiring them. Importantly, Shipa does this while continuing to provide developers with application-level context. The infrastructure components never need to be managed since Shipa provides a comprehensive set of out-of-the-box integrations to common tools.

For platform and DevOps engineers, Shipa provides the tools to maintain application availability, continually meet security requirements, and keep developers productive across multiple clusters and providers. Shipa eliminates the need to put resources toward creating and managing a custom PaaS on top of Kubernetes, creating Kubernetes and YAML files, or developing custom scripts to automate application deployment and management. Platform and DevOps engineers can then focus on higher-value work while enabling developers to focus on code for faster application delivery and iteration.

"The idea for Shipa emerged from continued frustrations with the application layer," said Bruno Andrade, founder and CEO, Shipa. "Like many engineers, we routinely came up against efficiency-crippling challenges to deploying, managing, and iterating cloud native applications. While there's been plenty of attention on fixing cloud native infrastructure, we believe the application layer is just as ripe for innovation. With Shipa, we are redesigning how cloud native applications are deployed and operated, helping organizations leverage Kubernetes' benefits faster and at scale. We have taken what developers know are best practices for application delivery on Kubernetes, but built them natively into the Shipa framework so that they now become automatically part of every deployment pipeline. There is nothing in the community today solving these challenges and we look forward to developers, platform engineers, and DevOps teams putting Shipa to the test."

The founding team has extensive experience from the cloud native and application delivery space, bringing technical and business leadership experience from CloudBees (Jenkins), VMware, NeuVector, Juniper Networks, and Oracle.

Included features and benefits of Shipa's cloud native application management framework:

• Complete workflow integration: Application objects are created, deployed, and monitored automatically. Developers can keep their focus on delivering code and do not need to change processes or learn additional tools.
• Application-centric observability: Shipa provides an application dependency map, so users can easily understand their application architecture and components' health and status.
• Complete audit trail: Shipa offers an audit trail and advanced canary & rollback management for faster and safer delivery of applications and updates.
• Stack integration: Shipa integrates into existing pipelines – CI/CD pipelines, APM tools, incident management, and more – making implementation easy so users get results faster.
• Multi-cluster and multi-cloud: Easy cross-cluster and cross-cloud performance, security, and policy management and monitoring.
• Support for persistent applications: Shipa connects to all major Container Storage Interfaces (CSIs); no need to learn or create YAML or volume-related files.
• Support for application services: Shipa provides native services to applications, such as databases, queuing, logging, and more.
• Routing and observability: Shipa provides automated monitoring and application-related metrics to better understand application status – which can also be integrated with third-party monitoring platforms.
• Open APIs: Users can easily integrate the Shipa framework with their preferred external platforms.

"In the rush to take advantage of the immense benefits of cloud native architectures, many organizations begin realizing the complexity and challenges of scaling their Kubernetes deployments," Ashmeet Sidana, Chief Engineer, Engineering Capital. "Operational roadblocks and inefficiencies are an increasing reality for enterprises around this space, and with Shipa, these problems can now be solved even before you start scaling your cloud native infrastructure. We're proud to have partnered with Bruno Andrade and led the company's seed round. We see a compelling opportunity in what Shipa is creating."

"We welcome Shipa as a new CNCF member and anticipate its contributions that will enable developers to accelerate their cloud native applications, from development to production," said Priyanka Sharma, general manager of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation.

"Cloud native applications are a combination of existing and new software development patterns. The existing patterns are software automation (infrastructure and systems), API integrations, and software service abstractions," Ken Owens, Shipa advisor and CNCF TOC Emeritus. "The new cloud native patterns consist of microservices architecture, containerized services, and distributed management and orchestration, which is an area where the community welcomes Shipa."

Additional Information and Resources

• Request a demo
• Download and Install Shipa
• Documentation
• Join a webinar with Kelsey Hightower on October 22nd

About Shipa
Shipa delivers a unique cloud native application management framework built for the full application lifecycle. Using Shipa, organizations speed up cloud native application development by eliminating persistent workflow inefficiencies. For developers, Shipa provides an application-centric way to develop, deploy, and manage cloud native applications without requiring Kubernetes expertise. For platform and DevOps engineers, Shipa's lightweight framework eliminates the need to develop custom scripts or manage a lengthy migration – while still providing centralized control over configurations. Shipa is headquartered in Santa Clara, California.

Media Contact:
Kyle Peterson
Clement | Peterson
Direct: 415.723.0104
http://www.clementpeterson.com