Full-stack application development platform Seaplane IO announced on Tuesday, Apr. 26, the launch of its beta period for select users, giving app developers a suite of enhanced cloud-based management tools to structure their platform as needed. Its acquisition of $15 million in a Series A headed by Sequoia Capital, in addition to Atlantic Bridge and 8VC.
As its name suggests, Seaplane IO carries a sophisticated yet still simple control plane to allow developers various tools to design and manage applications on a global scale. The company claims its platform has autoscaling and globally optimized system to bring updates and full applications when and wherever needed. Application design teams can structure multi-cloud and multi-region apps through Seaplane on its simplified full-stack platform.
Seaplane's co-founder and CEO, Niall Dalton, explains just how specifically the platform works via its low-code user interface: "Seaplane is for makers everywhere, whether you're running a simple website or an application that needs 10 petaflops of compute and 10 petabytes of data within 10 milliseconds of every end-user on the planet."
As Dalton himself relays, the Seaplane platform is built for all kinds of varied users, no matter if it's among small and medium-sized businesses (SMB) or a large enterprises. The platform utilizes deployable containerized workloads, which essentially gives developers a ton more free time, as Seaplane itself will see and use the best possible public cloud, as well as edge resources in line with the business' specific budget restraints, follow the correct regulatory guidelines, and track all necessary performance requirements and traffic.
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Seaplane is also working on improving its product line with more services, like enhanced coordination and upgraded databases. Its full suite of Managed Global Compute parameters won't be available to all customers until Q2 2022, but as of right now, the company is holding an invite-only beta to test out and track its overall potential.
"We currently support standard containerized applications. Customers upload their containers to our registry and deploy it globally through a simple CLI or API," Dalton details to VentureBeat. "Seaplane manages the deployments from there, based on each customer's configuration preferences, budget and business requirements."
The platform itself then scales accordingly to the business' own needs, "based on end-user traffic patterns and performance." Seaplane does all the heavy lifting for app management, including "routing and load balancing, horizontal and vertical scaling, automatic workload location adjustment, and resource allocation."
It also has an ingrained metadata key-value service that's global, allowing Seaplane to disperse and coordinate application containers across various workloads more effectively. Seaplane works alongside data and computes services, such as PubSub messaging, SQL, and more, in order to streamline the entire engineering and development cycle.
Investors are keen on its simplified approach to application development and management, best expressed via Sequoia Capital's Bill Coughran, who details that devs would rather be spending their time shipping the application as opposed to continuously building out its internal infrastructure.
He says, "Rather than struggle with complex and fragmented public cloud platform building blocks, developers can leverage Seaplane's APIs to run their containerized app stacks everywhere, from the edge to the cloud."
While its invite-only beta may already be long lost for those interested, the company has a message forum for those potentially keen on its platform. Those looking to enhance their app, create a whole new one, or expand into new territory may well find Seaplane as the ideal candidate in the field.
