Venture capital-fueled startup Bluebricks is setting out to provide a new option for Infrastructure as Code, with its proprietary Atomic Infrastructure technology.
The company is currently hoping to catch the wave of enterprises planning to adopt cloud platforms. More than 70% of enterprises plan to do so by 2027, according to Gartner.
Bluebricks promises that its technology can cut the usually-expensive DevOps process to automate infrastructure, while offering a more modular approach than that of using HashiCorp’s Terraform. It uses small reusable blueprints that can be assembled together to compose complex systems.
“Cloud computing is very exciting, but it takes a long time to provision resources,” said Idan Yalovich, co-founder and CEO at Bluebricks. Previously, Yalovich founded Zest, an AI-driven enterprise search company acquired by WalkMe.
Yalovich compared infrastructure provisioning unfavorably to software engineering, which has a plethora of tools to help speed development.
“When you face cloud infrastructure, it is not like that,” he said.
The Atomic technology is different in that it does not create a massive file that describes all the infrastructure as discrete sets of components.
“When you actually mix the services and the states, you end up with massive state,” he said.
What Yalovich came up with, called Atomic Infrastructure, is an abstraction placed over the infrastructure layer. Think of it as a service mesh, or a set of services that are semantically related, he said.
Say, for instance, you have a security breach, which necessitates a change in the settings for a virtual private cloud (VPC). With the Bluebricks setup, you just change one specific configuration, that of the VPC, and all those other components that are directly related top the VPC are updated. Behind the scenes, a graph database manages all the relations.
The configuration settings can be in Helm charts, SQL statements or Pulumi settings files, and can be work across multiple clouds (Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud etc).
“You create a blueprint, then you upload it and publish and it becomes an immutable blueprint,” Yalovich explained. The values then can be stored in a git repository or some other data store which is associated with a specific environment. Changes in values kick off a workflow that validates the changes and then pushes them to production.
API First
Although the service will offer a command-line interface, it works primarily through an API, allowing other provisioning tools to interact with the Atomic technology. There will also be a GUI to allow users to browse the graph edges visually.
The company is currently in the beta stage of release and working towards general availability. A few large organizations have signed on to test the technology.
Last month, the company announced that it had received a $4.5 million seed round led by Flint Capital and Glilot Capital and a number of other industry investors.
Bluebricks is not the only new entrant in the IaC space. Last month, Adam Jacob’s System Initiative launched its platform, which uses a graph database to organize large numbers of resources.
The post Bluebricks Atomic Infra Provides Terraform Alternative appeared first on The New Stack.
Bluebricks' Atomic technology allows admins to make a change once and have it automatically propagate to all the connecting technologies.