ClusterHQ today announced that it has raised a $12 million Series A round led by Accel Partners London, with participation from Canaan Partners and existing investors.
The company may not be a household name yet, but its Flocker tool has gotten quite a bit of attention among developers because it makes it easier to move apps that run in Docker containers and their data. Almost by default, Docker is more about handling stateless services — that is, the application logic and not the data.
Flocker expands the Docker ecosystem by giving developers a tool for managing data volumes in Docker clusters and making them as portable as their Docker containers. It supports many of the most popular databases, key-value stores and message queueing services and runs on most cloud computing platforms, with support for CoreOS, Cloud Foundry and Mesosphere coming soon.
Besides Flocker, the company is also working on Powerstrip, a tool for building prototype Docker extensions.
The company raised a $1 million seed round in 2013, just around the time the hype around containers got started. Its CEO Mark Davis previously co-founded Virsto Software, a storage service that was acquired by VMware in 2013. ClusterHQ co-founder and CTO Luke Marsen was previously an infrastructure engineer at TweetDeck.
Davis tells me that the company’s business model will be quite similar to that of other open-source companies in that ClusterHQ will launch a number of paid tools and consulting services in the long run. It’s no surprise then, that the company plans to use its funding to expand its technical and go-to-market resources. Davis notes that the team is working on building more features into Flocker and that his company is “actively working with the community on a number of projects and will have more to say about partnerships in the future.”