OpsLevel’s founders contend that the concept of “DevOps” has lost its original significance, and developers are still lacking the necessary resources to effectively implement its core principles. The startup, established by John Laban and Kenneth Rose – both early contributors to PagerDuty – announced today that it has secured $5 million in seed funding. This funding round was spearheaded by Vertex Ventures, with additional participation from S28 Capital, Webb Investment Network, Union Capital, and several angel investors, including PagerDuty’s three founding members.

Laban explained that PagerDuty played a crucial role in the growth of the DevOps movement, particularly in establishing effective on-call systems for engineers. However, he emphasized that on-call support and incident response are inherently reactive. “Ken [Rose] and I identified an opportunity to assist organizations in adopting a more preventative approach. The primary goal is to avoid downtime and security vulnerabilities altogether, rather than simply addressing them as they arise.”

Driven by this objective, the team aimed to re-establish the foundational principles of DevOps by empowering engineering teams with direct ownership of their services, fostering a “you build it, you own it” environment, as described by Rose. They’ve observed that service ownership is a common challenge for many companies. As organizations transition to microservices or serverless architectures, it often becomes ambiguous who is responsible for specific components, leading to neglected services lacking proper maintenance. This frequently results in compromised security and reduced reliability. Simultaneously, the lack of awareness regarding existing systems causes teams to duplicate efforts, recreating services that already exist to address their individual needs.

According to the team’s announcement, “There has been insufficient investment in the tools required to make DevOps truly functional. Significant further development is needed to enable engineering teams to embrace service ownership and fully realize the potential of DevOps.”

At the heart of OpsLevel is a “service ownership platform,” beginning with a comprehensive inventory of the services currently operated by an engineering organization.

Laban stated, “Our intention is to restore the original meaning of DevOps. We believe the term has become diluted and we want to refocus attention on service ownership. We will be dedicating substantial resources to expanding our product capabilities and collaborating with our clients to ensure they fully embrace ownership of their services and effectively address this challenge.”

OpsLevel’s current clientele includes Segment, Zapier, Convoy, and Under Armour. The team notes that their platform delivers the most value to companies managing approximately 20 to 30 distinct services. Below that threshold, simpler tools like wikis or spreadsheets are often sufficient, but these methods tend to become inadequate as complexity increases.

OpsLevel provides various methods for organizations to begin cataloging their services. Teams that prefer a “config-as-code” methodology can leverage existing YAML files within their Git workflows. Alternatively, OpsLevel offers APIs that can integrate with existing service creation processes.

The company finalized its funding round in late September. The team reported that the pandemic did not significantly impede their fundraising efforts, a sentiment echoed by many companies recently securing funding (though this observation is naturally biased towards those who have been successful in raising capital).

Laban explained, “We secured this funding to accelerate the development of our product. We’ve been experiencing positive traction with our customers and are committed to expanding our product offerings and investing in our go-to-market strategy to further accelerate our growth.”