Ask Alan Shreve why he founded Ngrok, a service that helps developers share sites and apps running on their local machines or server, and he will tell you it was to solve a hard-to-grok infrastructure problem he encountered while at Twilio. Shreve was developing on webhooks without an appropriate development environment which slowed the deployment process.
He had a solution called ngrok. An open source package that grew into a distributed platform aims to collapse various networking technologies into a unified layer, allowing developers to deliver apps the same way regardless of whether they are deployed to the public cloud, serverless platforms, or their own data center.
The company raised $50 million in a Series A round led by Lightspeed Venture Partners. Shreve says that with the fresh capital, the company will make continued investments to improve its core product offering.
Developers tape together various open source projects, home-grown proxy layers and combine them with disparate services from cloud-specific vendors like Amazon Web Services. Shreve said in an email interview that developers are required to use low-layer networking resources.
It's a reverse proxy for services and apps, fronting web services running in clouds or private networks or on a local machine. It gives developers internet access to private systems normally hidden behind a firewalls, providing an internet accessible address anyone can get to and linking the other side of the tunnel toFunctionality running locally.
It's possible to add security and observability features to existing apps without changing the code. Developers are able to build demo websites without having to deploy them with the help of Ngrok. They can use the internet of things in the field to connect to private cloud software.
Developers need to deliver their applications on the internet. It is possible to make your service available securely to its customers by using Ingress. Shreve said that the entrance is an application's front door. The way applications are built has changed. Microservice architectures, serverless platforms and other shifts in the industry have led to a proliferation of newAPIs and apps which need their own in different environments.
Shreve appears to have made a lot of noise about it, with five million users and 30,000 paying customers. Shreve wouldn't reveal revenue figures, but he did say that revenue doubled thanks to well-paying clients.
Some of the companies that are well funded include ZeroTier, Netmaker, and Defined Networking's Nebula. Tailscale raised $100 million for its mesh networking technology that can be installed on a single server and used to share software services.
Shreve wasn't made aware of it if he was concerned.
Organizations have between 200 and 1000 apps. Shreve said, "Delivering apps more quickly moves the needle by keeping developers focused on solving real business problems and not dealing with networking complexity."
More developers are entering the industry and building more applications, most of which will be delivered over the internet. This involves a complex mix of networking and security technologies that is expensive, time-Consuming to manage, and does not scale. App delivery over the internet is simplified by Ngrok. One click or a single line of code can be used to deliver an app.
There are 59 people working at the offices in San Francisco and Seattle. It is actively looking for new employees.
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