The competitive landscape for app development tool providers keeps getting tighter, with Meteor Development Group raising $20 million for its stack of frameworks and tools for developing web and mobile applications in JavaScript.
The round, led by Matrix Partners with investments also coming in from Andreessen Horowitz and Trinity Ventures, will give MDG the resources it needs to offer paid products that supplement its open source framework and tools.
Meteor Development Group CEO Geoff Schmidt laid out a rough road map for the company’s upcoming offerings in a phone call with TechCrunch yesterday. First up is Galaxy, a system for running Meteor applications based on Google’s open source Kubernetes project, which itself is a system for managing resources for applications running as services in containers.
Slated for full release later this year, Schmidt says Galaxy will first roll out to a select group of companies who already have apps in production using Meteor. These companies will work closely with MDG, providing feedback on how it fits into their workflows as well as insight into how it performs in the real world. When it opens up to more customers after the early access period, Galaxy will be available in free, pay-by-the-hour, and enterprise tiers.
MDG has built Galaxy to initially run on Amazon Web Services, with Schmidt citing demand from developers working on Amazon’s infrastructure. But in the future, Galaxy will work across infrastructure providers, with support for Microsoft Azure and Google’s Cloud Platform in the works.
But Galaxy is just the first piece of a much larger puzzle. Schmidt told me that building and hosting applications are important, but things like app performance analytics and testing are just as vital to the ongoing development process and Meteor has software in the pipeline that will address those as well.
In addition to its long-run efforts, Meteor also has more immediate work going into the open source platform to make it useful to even more developers. While Meteor offers a library that can handle UI, some developers might prefer to use Angular or React. Meteor’s modular nature means those dedicated to other UI frameworks have been able to get them working, but Schmidt says work is going into supporting them more directly. The same can be said for Windows support, which has been in development for some time.
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