Chaos engineering was originally developed by large companies to help pressure test systems in production. Over time, startups and open source projects have made it more accessible, but it is still mostly used by SREs (site reliability engineers) testing production systems.
Steadybit, a German startup, wants to make these tests available to more developers by building them into its development pipeline. Today, the company announced the general availability of its Chaos Engineering product.
Benjamin Williams, co-founder and CEO of Steadbit, said that by pushing chaos testing into the development pipeline, they can involve specialists and solve problems before they get to the product.
“Developers are hacked after an accident and under a lot of pressure. We want to get them into a proactive approach earlier in the process of testing and validating their code before it goes into production.” Wills told TechCrunch.
He said they need to make sure the software can handle problems like cloud outages, rolling updates or any other potential software failure.
Before joining Steadybit, Wilms was a consultant who worked with development teams to help test their projects, and by the time they brought him in, he realized the software had been released too late. He saw an opportunity and started a startup in 2019 with his co-founders.
They built a solution to test the dynamic nature of software development today and let developers code the testing process into the process, making it more automated to catch problems before they become issues for users.
Image Credits: Steadybit
It’s early days, but the company has five paying customers and 11 employees. He said diversity is important when building his company, and he’s trying to learn from others who have built successful diverse organizations.
The startup raised a total of $7.8 million in funding in three rounds: a $200,000 pre-seed in 2019, followed by a $2.6 million seed in 2020 and another $5 million second seed last year.
Elliott Derby, general partner at Boldstart Ventures and led the seed round, was so impressed after hearing about the company that he flew to Germany the next day to meet the team in person and agreed to write a check that night. What surprised him?
“Prior to Steadybit, ‘Chaos’ tooling was originally designed for SREs and operators, not developers. “What I’m most excited about (and the next day on the plane to Germany) is the developer’s focus on making it easy for product teams to test how their applications/services work, sharing responsibility with SREs and operators,” Durbin told TechCrunch. .
