Today, we celebrate Facets' $4 million seed funding, led by 3one4 Capital. This milestone provides a moment to reflect on our journey and share our DevOps vision with the world.
Origin: The nagging problem
My decade-long run at Capillary Technologies and especially the last few years as the CTO gave me a panoramic view of its meteoric rise. But rapid growth often masks the intricate engineering challenges underneath.
For starters, Capillary was building new products, launching in new geographies, acquiring organizations, and starting to serve super-enterprise customers. From a DevOps perspective, this meant we needed to launch new environments in multiple geographies, do private deployments for super-enterprise customers while continuing to push releases - really really fast.
This meant a lot of the burden fell on the Ops team (which is always a lean team in proportion to the bigger Development team). Ops found itself in a perpetual burnt-out state - juggling numerous deployments, monitoring releases across regions, and striving to keep pace with rapid development.
The result was unoptimized cloud, bloating costs, and slowing down of feature releases - not to mention unhappy developers.
By this time, Anshul, Rohit, and I had been working together for many years. We often found ourselves engrossed in debates on how best to ensure the Ops team was able to manage these growing demands. We debated, ideated, and discarded a dozen solutions before we broke down the problem from First Principle thinking.
Our belief crystallized around two core ideas: transform the Ops team from owners to enablers of infrastructure, and make infrastructure so intuitive that developers can autonomously meet their requirements, albeit within guardrails.
From Idea to Inception: Facets
We became clear that to work on this idea, we needed a complete rethink; a new purpose, that became the genesis of Facets.
Our conversations with organizations spanning across domains further solidified this belief. Although diverse in their challenges, a recurring theme emerged: DevOps bandwidth bottleneck stifling the development team and a constant catchup for an optimized cloud environment.
This challenge was representative of a broader systemic problem within the DevOps space -- The prevailing mindset of the Ops team acting as the custodians of infrastructure, rather than facilitators.
Our conviction grew: DevOps needed a rethink. The old ways of managing DevOps had to end.
The broader industry was also trapped in a vicious cycle. While we had frameworks for every technology, every company was literally reinventing the wheel when it came to DevOps, leading to piecemeal developer experiences. It became clear to us: DevOps needed a significant overhaul.
Our philosophy behind Facets has never been about merely building a tool; it has been about filling a glaring market void. The alignment in our vision and shared fervor for enhancing the developer experience seamlessly transitioned us into natural co-founders.
At its heart, Facets aims to dismantle the convoluted process that companies undertake to stitch up DevOps workflows. With Facets, we offer a ready-to-use Cloud Deployment Platform that’s also flexible enough to cater to unique infrastructure needs.
The next chapter: The DevOps revolution
Revolutionizing industry norms is a Herculean task. For DevOps to transform, a foundational shift in perception is crucial. Facets stands on the brink of this transformation, bolstered by our recent funding.
In the next few years, we aspire to technologically fortify Facets and enter new markets, advocating for Platform Engineering - an embodiment of our philosophy that prioritizes developer autonomy with Ops as infrastructure facilitators.
Our journey may be uncharted, but our resolve is steadfast: to usher in a new DevOps era centered on developer experience and productivity.
You can find the official press release of the funding here
