Puppet acquires Distelli to bolster cloud computing automation platform

Source – geekwire.com

Rahul Singh started with a single focus when he launched Distelli more than two years ago: give developers a way to ship better software faster.

Now he’s doubling down on that mission with a little help from a leading cloud computing company.

Portland-based Puppet today announced that it has acquired Distelli, a Seattle startup founded in 2015 by Singh that helps software engineers deploy code more efficiently.

Terms of the deal were not disclosed. Distelli employees — five are listed on LinkedIn — will move into Puppet’s recently-opened Seattle engineering office. It’s a short move, as Distelli already worked in the same building and will be relocating nine floors downward.

Distelli, which raised a $2.8 million round in 2015 led by Andreessen Horowitz, gives companies a way to deploy software code to platforms like Kubernetes or virtual machines, regardless of cloud provider or physical data center. Customers like Usermind and DocuSign also use the product for better visibility into the software development process through dashboards.

Puppet is a 12-year-old cloud automation company that helps more than 37,000 customers with a variety of cloud-native software development tools that ease their transition to the cloud. Puppet, which has raised $85 million to date and is ranked No. 5 on the GeekWire 200 list of Pacific Northwest startups, offers a number of tools ranging from configuration management to DevOps.

More recently, customers have been using Puppet to also deploy applications. As the company started thinking about how to further assist its customers with that process, Distelli came to mind.

“We quickly realized Distelli represented the best of everything that we were hoping to get,” said Puppet Chief Product Officer Omri Gazitt, who added that the Seattle startup “matched perfectly with our philosophy.”

Singh told GeekWire that his customers are demanding more choice and automation across the entire stack. He had followed Puppet over the years and the idea of combining forces “was too compelling for me to turn down.”

“It’s a huge win for customers,” he explained. “It gives them power across the entire stack, and it doesn’t force them to choose.”

Singh previously spent eight years at Amazon working on key platform technologies that helped power Amazon Web Services through its early stages of growth.

Puppet CEO Sanjay Mirchandani said that the deal “gives us a value proposition that nobody else in the marketplace brings to customers.”

When Mirchandani first began talking with Singh about a potential deal, they both connected on the idea that every company now needs to embrace building better software, and do it faster. This was Singh’s mission from Day 1 at Distelli and he says it will continue after the acquisition.

“The mission has not changed,” he said. “We’re going to grow on that together with Puppet.”

The deal also gives Puppet more presence on Kubernetes, which is becoming the go-to method for managing containers. Distelli’s Kubernetes Dashboard allows customers to organize their development workflow by moving code they’ve committed to a version control hub like Github through the container-creation process and onto a Kubernetes cluster, where it can then schedule those containers to deploy across multiple servers automatically.

Puppet will bring Distelli’s products into their offerings, while Distelli will continue to serve its existing customers.

Puppet’s Seattle office just opened this summer and it will grow to 20 to 30 engineers over the next year.

This deal is the latest example of how the Seattle region continues to be one of the most robust cloud computing ecosystems in the world. Gazitt, an ex-Microsoft engineer, told GeekWire in July that Seattle is “certainly number one in cloud” when it comes to the concentration of talent working in the field. Other companies in the area include Chef, a similar DevOps automation company that has raised $103 million, along with BitTitan, Acumatica, Skytap, Sky Kick, Shippable, and others.