Cloud management and the ability to have insight and control of cloud costs is becoming an important topic, and with the current mandatory WFH, being able to create infrastructure-as-code (IaC) environments quickly is critical to maintaining - to the extent possible - a business as usual, customer first approach. env0 does just that. To learn more, VMblog talked with co-founder and CEO Ohad Maislish about their approach and the public beta that was just released.

VMblog:  Tell me about how you started env0.

Ohad Maislish:  I started env0 with Omry Hay, who joined on as my co-founder and CTO in late 2018. Omry and I have known each other almost 10 years now, meeting at a financial startup called eToro. My background is in product development and when env0 was still just an idea, I wasn't sure which role I should have, thinking that instead of CEO, I should instead be CTO so I could continue focusing on our product. However, I recalled a great blog post by David Ring, the CTO of eToro, which suggested that product-oriented CEOs are the best CEOs. I agreed with David's thinking, which led me to the conclusion that I should instead be env0's CEO and find a CTO. Omry, with his RnD management experience and a background in backend and infrastructure, was looking for a new challenge and was very interested in joining the team. He made the perfect co-founder CTO and after just a few phone calls and some meetings in coffee shops -- we shook hands. This was the minute that env0 became a reality.

VMblog:  Can you give our readers an idea of what env0 is?

Maislish:  env0 develops infrastructure-as-code (IaC) management software, and we're the first cloud management platform built to enable secure, self-service infrastructure deployment in cloud environments including AWS, Azure and GCP. Our product is built around the env0 governance engine, which helps teams maximize cloud productivity without overloading users with complicated processes that can be daunting to everyone except a few dedicated DevOps professionals.

VMblog:  So env0 is for more than just developers or computer engineers?

Maislish:  Although DevOps and sysadmins are going to continue to be critical to running a successful business, we believe that a wider variety of users should be able to self-provision infrastructure as well. env0 is designed for all teams that use cloud infrastructure to be productive - developers, sales, customer service - can all take advantage of our platform to self-provision their own environments without compromising existing governance, deployment, or auditing policies. 

VMblog:  Explain what you recently announced.

Maislish:  We announced the availability of the public beta version of the env0 platform which offers a scalable way to provision cloud resources while centrally managing security features like privileges, policies, tokens, and credentials. We're excited to offer this new type of infrastructure management solution to help companies of all sizes reduce their cloud costs by tracking infrastructure usage, monitoring performance, and responding to security issues in real-time.

VMblog:  What's next for env0 and the product?

Maislish:  We have worked hard to make our public beta as production-ready as possible and this is a strong product. For next steps, we are looking for DevOps engineers, developers, sales engineers and others to validate the product and provide feedback so we can better prioritize new features and understand new use cases. We expect the product to be generally available in Fall 2020.

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