ConfigHub raises $4M to bring order to chaotic mass of configuration files – News

Three renowned cloud innovators are joining forces to create a new startup that’s taking on the extremely daunting challenge of modernizing the labyrinth of configuration data underpinning today’s software-defined world.

The company is called ConfigHub Inc., and it has just launched with $4 million in pre-seed funding from Crane Venture Partners, Pear VC and Encoded Ventures. It’s led by Chief Executive Alexis Richardson, founder of cloud-native container management platform Weaveworks Inc., Chief Technology Officer Brain Grant, a former software engineer at Google LLC who helped create Kubernetes, and Chief Product Officer Jesper Joergensen, who previously worked on the Heroku project at Salesforce Inc.

ConfigHub aims to modernize modern software operations by reinventing the way software configuration data is created, structured and managed.

The startup says there’s an urgent need for a rethink, because software has transformed over the last 20 years to become the vital infrastructure of the modern economy. Last year, CrowdStrike Holdings Inc. took down half of the internet after issuing a fault configuration update for its Falcon Sensor security suite, causing havoc across the world as millions of critical systems went offline. Delta Airlines alone lost more than $500 million as a result of the disruption to its systems, and some estimates say Fortune 500 companies lost a combined $500 billion.

Although accidental, the disruption caused by CrowdStrike underscores the critical role software plays in the modern economy, and how it’s all held together by a tenuous web of interconnected components linked by application programming interfaces that combine to create more powerful systems. The challenge is that if any part of this fragmented web of software systems runs into problems, it can bring hundreds of others that are dependent on it.

Configuration data is the secret sauce that helps all of these moving parts in the software world play nicely with each other, ensuring that different systems understand how they’re supposed to behave. These files play an essential role in keeping our software-based infrastructure up and running, but they’re also an extremely unwieldy mess that can cause major headaches if something goes wrong.

ConfigHub wants to tackle that problem. The startup explains that config data is different from basic software code because it defines system settings and behaviors, so it cannot be debugged in the same way. Nonetheless, it’s vital to understand this data to avoid damaging misconfigurations that can bring down disparate systems in the same way CrowdStrike did.

The New Stack describes configuration data as a “labyrinth of settings and dependencies” and says it’s almost inevitable that things will go wrong from time to time. It argues that we’re facing a “configuration crisis” and there’s an urgent need for someone to try and fix it.

ConfigHub’s founders believe that the main factor behind this crisis is that the tools and workflows for creating and managing configuration data have not kept pace with the evolution of the software it supports. For instance, 20 years ago most software was updated via CD-ROMs that uploaded service packs onto servers.

But these days everything is updated using a myriad of interdependent software modules linked by a web of APIs. And there’s no easy way for anyone to describe, inspect and update the configuration data that powers them.

The startup has set itself the ambitious goal of unifying configuration management with modern, automated development workflows and compliance. So instead of engineers having to go hunting for the right configuration file when an error occurs, everything will be logged on a single database that maps these files, making them simpler to find. It will also visualize how these configuration files support the underlying software, so engineers can see what is actually happening in their system.

Richardson said ConfigHub is already working with a number of enterprise partners, though the company’s product launch is still several months away. But when it becomes available, it will be served as a software-as-a-service platform, with an initial focus on Kubernetes developer tools such as Argo, Flux, Helm and Terraform, as well as the latter platform’s open-source fork OpenTofu.

“We founded ConfigHub because, over and over and over again, we see even sophisticated organizations like GitHub attributing major outages to config errors,” Richardson said. “When GitHub is on fire then we know that managing config is an ubiquitous problem. The time has come to modernise operations.”

Pear VC Partner Arash Afrakhteh said configuration files are the backbone and also the bottleneck of modern software operations, so there’s an urgent need to tackle their complexity, which has plagued even the most well-resourced enterprises.

“ConfigHub’s approach to unifying configuration management with modern workflows is exactly what the industry needs to move beyond reactive firefighting into proactive, scalable operations,” he added.

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