Bunnyshell raises $4M to auto-emulate production environments for developers

Romanian startup Bunnyshell, which offers an environment-as-a-service (EaaS) platform, today announced it has raised $4 million in funding to simplify development challenges for enterprises.

For years, developers building cloud-native projects have struggled with testing and staging roadblocks. They have to spend hours creating environments that emulate complex production setups and then give more time to keep those environments updated and in sync to avoid defects that could lead to bottlenecks in merging the code (being developed) and refactoring. A slight variance in the replicas can result in cases of drifting in production and hit the development cycle.

Bunnyshell automatically spins production replicas

Founded in 2018, Bunnyshell solves this challenge by automatically spinning up new always-updated, ephemeral environments for development, testing, demo or the deployment of applications in customers’ clouds. This can be anything from the simplest static websites to the most complex applications built using microservices with many cloud-native dependencies.

“With every pull request, Bunnyshell automatically creates an environment. Everything is parameterized so developers have pointers to that environment and can run manual or automated testing. We then automatically delete the environment when it’s not needed. We also auto-update the environment whenever there’s a change so the developer doesn’t have to do anything,” Alin Dobra, cofounder and CEO of Bunnyshell, told Venturebeat.

The company claims that the solution can create production replicas no matter how complex the architecture is and what services are being used. All a developer has to do is connect to their repository and cloud provider and it automatically discovers the services, both internal and external, creating development and staging environments needed. It then tracks source code changes and triggers defined at the project level to automatically update existing environments or build new ephemeral environments for every pull request.

“…we use multiple cloud providers such as AWS, Azure, GCP and Digital Ocean and integrate with multiple cloud services for both our production and staging environments. We leverage the power of multiple CI/CD providers that manage our Terraform modules, Helm charts, and deployment on Kubernetes,” Dobra explained.

This eventually enables developers to develop and test their code as close to production as possible and deliver higher quality code faster and more frequent releases, with fewer rollback requests.

Growth

In the last year alone, Bunnyshell claims to have grown 700% with “dozens” of customers coming in from different countries. 

“Environments-as-a-service is a new category so most of our customers were not even looking for a platform to help them release faster but were considering building internal tools that consume a lot of resources and time. The challenge is that it can take a bunch of DevOps engineers and a few months to achieve what they can do with Bunnyshell in days,” the CEO noted.

While not many players directly go against the company, many are racing to accelerate development and update cycles for enterprises in their own way. Just recently, Altogic, which handles backend development, and Zipy, focusing on improving debugging tactics, both raised seed funding. Meanwhile, California-based software reliability platform Last9 raised $11 million in series A funding.

With this round of funding, which was led by Early Game Ventures (EGV) and RocaX Ventures, Bunnyshell will focus on expanding its footprint in the U.S. market, scaling its sales and marketing teams and introducing critical product improvements.

“Security is a priority for us and we are already in the process of getting SOC2 certification. We also plan on allowing users to granularly define role-based access for each member of their teams and also integrate their private Kubernetes clusters with Bunnyshell while remaining compliant with their security certifications,” Dobra said.