Our investment in Komodor: Levelling-up K8s incident response
If you’ve ever been an on-call engineer, you can relate to that sinking feeling you get when you receive a PagerDuty alert telling you that something has gone wrong with your infrastructure. It’s likely that the first question you ask yourself is “what changed?”. The challenge is that the volume and velocity of changes going into production today is enormous. And, in modern Kubernetes (K8s) microservices environments, the answer to this operative question becomes exponentially more complex to discern.
Furthermore, there is not one tool that provides the answer. The on-call team has a cumbersome process of logging-on to several tools - including monitoring & observability, CI/CD, code repositories, and communication channels, to establish the root cause and then work out how to resolve it. Depending on company size, this can be a daily challenge and can take anything from a few minutes to a number of hours. It’s not only stressful, but also potentially costly to your business.
As enterprises adopt the ‘you built it, you own it’ paradigm, it’s also no secret that the role of the developer is changing, and troubleshooting these infrastructure issues is increasingly falling onto their shoulders. Developers, however, simply don’t have the tools or the experience to do this efficiently, so time is wasted or the issues have to be escalated to the SRE/DevOps teams.
Enter Komodor. Offering a unified view of all events, across the entire K8s stack, Komodor provides developers, ops, and on-call teams with the context and the actionable insights they need to solve issues efficiently and independently. With Komodor, developers can fix issues faster and focus on the most rewarding part of their job - creating and innovating - while companies can lower their mean-time-to-resolution (MTTR) and give customers a phenomenal product experience.
The founders, Ben and Itiel, quit their jobs to build Komodor in 2020 out of the personal frustration they experienced as on-call developers at Google and eBay. They now have a simple response to “what changed?” - “ask Komodor”. The product is intuitive and simple to use, and the early customer traction speaks for itself. The small pockets of Komodor usage in companies has rapidly expanded across entire R&D teams.
At Accel, we’ve been long-time investors in tools for developers and DevOps teams - Atlassian, Instana, PagerDuty, Sentry, and more. We’re excited to be teaming up with some exceptional angels from this ecosystem to support Komodor on its journey, including Sri Viswanath (CTO of Atlassian), Mike Tria (Head of Platform at Atlassian), Jason Warner (CTO of GitHub), Danny Grander (Co-Founder of Snyk), Tomer Levy (CEO of Logz.io), Amir Jerbi (Co-Founder of Aqua Security), and others.