Stacklet has emerged from stealth with its commercial cloud governance platform that accelerates how the Global 2000 manages their security, operations, visibility and cost optimization in the cloud. Stacklet is built with an open core model around the popular open source project Cloud Custodian that is used by thousands of well-known global brands today. The project's community has hundreds of active contributors including Amazon, Microsoft and Capital One and is growing rapidly.

Stacklet founders Travis Stanfield (CEO) and Kapil Thangavelu (CTO) met at Capital One where Thangavelu created Cloud Custodian, which is now part of the CNCF Sandbox, to give developers the freedom to use cloud native tools and resources with the right guardrails in place to ensure they use infrastructure inline with best practices. It takes a policy as code approach to governing infrastructure to keep organizations secure and well-managed in the cloud. It has the broadest coverage of cloud services and remediation capabilities and supports multi-cloud real-time governance using the native serverless capabilities of each cloud provider. Operationally, it integrates with the cloud provider's native metrics, logs, distributed tracing and object storage capabilities for ease of administration.

Because of the community demand for a commercial offering by a trusted provider, Stanfield and Thangavelu decided to found Stacklet. Stacklet provides a one stop shop for addressing enterprise needs on cloud governance, with an out-of-the-box product experience that has policies across security, cost and operations domains. Additionally it features automated operations, a real time cloud asset inventory and reporting visualizations. This enables organizations to move faster and manage their cloud footprints at scale across providers. 

"Organizations struggle with how to balance their productivity desires with governance requirements. Striking the right governance posture and keeping that posture up with the intense pace of innovation requires community, open source and crowd-sourcing. Stacklet empowers organizations to automate cloud governance via advanced product features with commercial support. This results in self-service to cloud technologies which are properly aligned with an organization's governance posture," said Travis Stanfield, co-founder and CEO of Stacklet. 

Stacklet provides a best-of-breed commercial solution for cloud governance addressing universal customer needs around security, operations, visibility and cost optimization. Its features include:

              • Policy Management - tooling to manage Cloud Custodian at scale across thousands of cloud accounts, policies and regions
              • Policy Packs - access to best practice policy sets which solve business problems out-of-the-box
              • Analytics - data and visualizations to understand policy health, resource auditing, trends and anomalies
              • Enterprise Resource CMDB - real-time inventory, historical revisions and change management of cloud assets

"There is so much fragmentation in the cloud tool space across security, management and cost domains when customers just want a single product that can provide a unified solution for their needs across multiple clouds. Stacklet is built to provide that unified solution to address these different needs - all delivered in a policy as code experience," said Kapil Thangavelu, co-founder and CTO of Stacklet and creator and lead maintainer of Cloud Custodian.

Beyond the commercial offering, the Stacklet team is continuing to invest in Cloud Custodian and lead the community. In addition to continuing to add to the detect, respond and recover capabilities already available today, Stacklet is contributing policy enforcement against infrastructure as code assets. This introduces preventative control by giving developers the ability to evaluate infrastructure code against their organization's governance standards early in the software lifecycle.

As part of today's announcement, Stacklet announced that it has raised $4 million in seed funding from Foundation Capital and Lee Fixel's new fund Addition.

"Managing security and governance policies in the cloud is one of the biggest challenges large enterprises face today. There is no better team to solve this than Stacklet. The Stacklet co-founders have been on the frontlines tackling this as practitioners at big corporations so they know first-hand what is needed to build an out-of-box commercial cloud governance solution that both IT/security admins and developers will want to use," said Sid Trivedi, partner at Foundation Capital.