Netflix open sourced its microservices orchestration platform, Conductor, in 2016, but announced it would cease maintenance last December. Fortunately for many companies using Conductor, Conductor's creator previously left the company and launched Orkes, a startup that provides his enterprise-grade microservices platform based on open source projects. Ta. Orkes will take over the maintenance of Conductor for the foreseeable future, and today the company announced that it has raised $20 million in Series A in addition to a $9.3 million seed round in 2022. The new round was led by Nexus Venture Partners with participation from: Existing investors are Battery Ventures and Vertex Ventures US.
The team built Conductor at Netflix in 2015. One of its goals is to enable Netflix's development team to keep up with the company's rapid growth and needs. Viren Baraiya, co-CTO of Orkes, told me that the project quickly became popular within Netflix. “One of the things we quickly realized was that there is no secret sauce at Netflix. In the spirit of giving back to the community, we decided to open source the project. ” he explained.
Orkes CEO Jeu George added that what people clearly want is a “layer on top of the cloud” that allows them to focus on building applications rather than infrastructure and orchestration challenges. . Today, thousands of companies, including Tesla, rely on Conductor to manage much of their technology stack. Other notable Orkes clients include mortgage giant United Wholesale Mortgage and Australian media company Foxtel.
Image credits: orkes
After Netflix canceled the open source project and Orkes took over, the startup reached out to a number of other companies and is now launching the Conductor Working Group. George said the whole idea here is to start a conductor foundation. However, he did not rule out the possibility of the project joining a larger foundation in the future. This is similar to how Netflix managed the Spinnaker project from open sourcing to establishing its own foundation and moving to growing cloud-native computing. Foundation.
Today, Orkes offers Conductor and its Conductor-based AI orchestration platform as a fully managed platform on a customer's cloud of choice.
For the most part, the company follows the established path of other open source businesses that offer premium enterprise services around popular projects. “We're seeing momentum from both existing open source users to say, 'This is a product we believe in, but we want to offer it as a managed service,'” said Dilip Lukose, chief product officer at Orkes. explained.
“Orkes is leading the creation of one of the most interesting categories in software infrastructure. When Orkes founders helped create the Conductor open source project at Netflix, they built complex, observable large-scale applications. We created a new playbook to build and operate, and now we can operationalize this modern approach to building applications across the enterprise,” said Abhishek Sharma, Managing Director, Nexus Venture Partners. I am.