Ariga raises 18M$ to build the future of working with databases
Today, we are delighted to share that Ariga (the company behind Atlas) has raised 18M$ in total from Tiger Global and TLV Partners to build our vision for the future of how organizations work with their databases.
This is an important milestone for us as it provides us with the resources we need to keep growing our open-source communities and build the products we envision for the industry. I want to take this opportunity to reflect on the work we've done in the past two+ years, and where we are going as a company.
Background
Databases play a crucial role in driving a company's success. From the outset, companies invest time in selecting a suitable database for building their product, modeling its schema, and building their application on top of it. As companies grow, they face challenges in performance, security, privacy, and more. Databases remain a vital component, accompanying businesses from the earliest stages and throughout their entire journey.
Ariga was founded after a decade of experience in building database infrastructure, and dev tooling frameworks. Our focus in the last two years has been on three fundamental pillars:
- Pioneering the “Schema-as-Code” concept within the industry
- Building an innovative database change management platform
- Open sourcing a versatile framework for developing data-driven server applications
I want to elaborate on these pillars and describe how they shaped our mission statement as an engineering team and a company.
Schema-as-Code
One of the core principles we advocate for is “Schema-as-Code”, which refers to the practice of defining and managing the database schema through code. Similar to Infrastructure as Code (IaC), which is used to manage infrastructure resources, SaC is about defining database schema elements in code format.
As with IaC, being able to capture the desired state of application data topologies (which are comprised of the database schemas, the connections between them, and the policies that govern them) unlocks the ability to automate many operations around them such as:
- Change management (provisioning, migrations, data migrations)
- Monitoring (drift detection, performance)
- Governance (enforcing access, privacy, and change policies)
- Collaboration (notifications, workflows, catalog/visibility)
- Runtime (API layers, caching, multi-tenancy, auditing, deletion)
Being able to capture not only the schema structure but also its behavior, access permissions, methods of access, and more. Adopting this approach simplifies management, ensures the schema is version-controlled, and allows the automation of most database operations.
From this core concept which we believe can have an outsized impact on the industry, similar to IaC, stem our core activities:
Atlas, our OSS schema management engine, was developed to bring the SaC concept to life, understanding that without a practical implementation, the theoretical idea couldn't truly showcase its benefits. By making Atlas open-source, we encourage broader adoption of the SaC concept.
Ent, our OSS application framework embodies the concept of schema-as-code. Define your application data topology in code: entities, relations, policies, behaviors, and have everything created automatically for the user from there.
Database Change Management
Databases are the most critical component of almost any software system; database downtime is equivalent to business downtime. Being stateful components, they cannot be easily rebuilt, scaled out, or fixed by a restart. Outages that involve damage to data or simply unavailability of the database are notoriously hard to manage and recover from, often taking long hours of careful work by a team's most senior engineers.
On the other hand, businesses are required to evolve faster than ever. Any change to the business carries a change to its underlying data model, which means modifying the database schema. Teams that can evolve their data model faster can respond quickly to market demands and customer feedback and beat the competition.
This puts organizations in a dilemma. To protect business stability, databases should seldom be changed to reduce the risk of an expensive outage. Simultaneously, database schemas must be constantly modified to accommodate the evolution of the business.
Ariga provides software engineering teams with the fastest and safest way to manage database schema changes. With our platform:
- Software developers do not need to worry about planning safe changes to the database schema. By using a simple data definition language, developers declare the desired schema of their database and our engine plans and applies the changes for them.
- Teams can define and enforce change policies during continuous integration to prevent dangerous changes way before they happen.
- Operators can deploy schema changes to production with peace of mind as dangerous changes are verified and simulated against real production data.
Database Runtime Access
Ariga was founded by the creators of Ent, a Linux Foundation-backed project beloved by software engineers in companies of various sizes and industries, from top firms to small startups.
Ent is an entity framework that provides application developers with robust, privacy-aware APIs for managing data, reducing 90% of repetitive code by generating efficient and fast GraphQL, REST, or gRPC servers. Ent users value it for its exceptional development experience and time-saving capabilities, often returning to it as a tool of choice for new projects.
Even though we actively engaged in our open-source communities, providing assistance on a daily basis to many users on our GitHub, Discord, and Slack channels, we've learned that some companies need additional support beyond the standard open-source options to thrive.
To address the needs of these organizations, we are launching our Ent-erprise Support program. Besides the dedicated support, our aim for this pillar is to solve performance, privacy, and runtime issues that reduce time and effort from engineers and allow them to move much faster.
Some of the problems we address involve multi-tenancy, performance enhancements, secure database access, and improved GraphQL/REST layers that automatically connect to Ent and Atlas. These components are seamlessly integrated not only with Ent but also with other frameworks, making them suitable for a broad range of companies.
Our Mission Statement
In conclusion, Ariga's mission focuses on empowering businesses through integrated database management solutions that span the entire product lifecycle. Our technology ranges from the initial stages of the data definition to ongoing database change management, and during data access at application runtime.
Using our expertise in these areas and commitment to the open-source, we aim to revolutionize the way companies manage their database schemas, allowing them to respond quickly to customer demands and market changes while maintaining high-quality and stable infrastructure.
Best,
