Hi everyone,

We are now reaching the end of 2021, and it’s time for another Lyrid product and company update! This year has been very different for everybody.

During the past few months, we are seeing more and more users rely on the platform for day-to-day operations. The team worked hard until the last days of the year to improve platform operations and availability across the board.  From giving Lyrid a new UI look to helping our users deploying scalable solutions on multiple different infrastructures. We are confident that our users can handle any type of workload they encounter! Although we’ve made significant progress, we will never stop improving our user experience. 

This December, Lyrid has pushed out features that culminate months of research and development. Let’s start with some product updates that I am very excited to share with everyone. 

Submission by Git Address + Simple Deployment Wizard

As a company, we want to make it easier for anyone to hop on the platform and start building.  We understand that the faster the journey finishes, the sooner users secure the value that they are seeking. So we’ve been constantly asking ourselves: How can we make onboarding faster? Or, how can we reduce friction— even more? These questions directed our recent changes to the entire product onboarding experience.

We started by creating a public GitHub repository that everyone can access, and the platform will pull from. Check out the list of our public GitHub repo: https://github.com/LyridInc

These repositories serve as base templates— made available to deploy into Lyrid as fast as possible. All you need to do is to pick a template, then start developing within our platform:

It’s simple. Once deployed, just download your template and start to hack your solutions.

Active and Favorite Revision

We had an early user ask if we could make it possible to save and revert revisions without any downtime. So we listened, and introduced this feature in the latest version that we deployed.

Let’s see how this all works.

First, let’s just start with a single deployment of an application. We will use our standard NodeJS 14.x template, just like how we deployed the basic templates above. Once the template deploys, you can open the application overview by clicking on the app itself:

‘Active’ revision is the version that is currently servicing the application, and setting revisions to ‘Favorite’ prevents it from getting deleted by any future submissions.

By default, the latest revision will be the ‘Active’, so here is how the application is currently served:

Let’s make some changes to the code and submit them again. We will continue making changes to the application as we develop them.

As the new code deploys, the ‘Active’ revision will be incremented to the latest version. Only one previous revision will be stored in the platform to roll back. Here’s how the flow of updates looks like.  You can see how the platform handles each code submission when making three separate version submissions:

In the end, after three submissions, the result will be:

• The latest 4th revision will be ‘Active’ revision,
• Revision 3 is the previous version, and the platform deletes Revision 2.
• We will keep Revision 1 within the platform because it's set to ‘Favorite’

Quickly revert to Revision 1 by clicking on the ‘Set As Active’ button:

Voilà, you are reverted to the revision that you marked as ‘Favorite’:

This flow is particularly important for maintaining a good deployment version that can be reverted in a flash— without any downtime.

Active Multi-Cloud Deployments

As we extend our multi-cloud deployment and execution strategy, we introduce a new deployment strategy that allows our users to: actively deploy, execute and maintain applications on all cloud infrastructures we support. To set this, go to your ‘Account Policies’ and set the ‘Default Execution Platform’ value to ‘ALL’:

Then go to your Cloud Account to push in credentials from all your public cloud accounts:

This deployment will actively utilize all the computes from all the cloud accounts you have configured in your “Cloud Account Tab” in a randomized fashion.

Template Updates

We have improved our native NodeJS based SSR Templates to be as close as they can be to the original. 

• NextJS - https://github.com/LyridInc/NextJS-NodeJS14.x-Template.git
• NuxtJS - https://github.com/LyridInc/NuxtJS-NodeJS14.x-Template.git
• GatsbyJS - https://github.com/LyridInc/GatsbyJS-NodeJS14.x-Template.git

As you can see in our public GitHub repository, these templates are not required to run in an Express web service anymore. Our internal code wrapper will be running web services on either our Lyrid Managed Kubernetes Clusters (LYR), AWS Lambda or Google Cloud Run.

Our goals are always to make it easier to for everyone to leverage the platform.

So we reduced the number of steps required to bring these types of projects into our platform, and the only requirement would be a lyrid-definition file:

Other considerable updates include:

• Domain Statistics: quick insight on the region that calls into your applications, the latency, and counter for each application domain.

• Notification tab to show the latest alerts and notifications:

• Various caching and optimization updates. Here, we reduced the internal call of AWS and Google applications by applying cache to the session management.
  

Southeast Asia—Engineering Development Entity Formation

These development efforts will not be possible without our ever-expanding engineering team. The past few months, we have been very excited about the expansion of our SouthEast Asia company footprint to scale our engineering efforts:

Over the past six months, our headcount grew over 100%.  Having more engineers on board not only means expanding our suite of products, but also added support for our loyal users. We understand that customers rely on Lyrid to run cloud operations, so our engineering team is here to make the process seamless and efficient as possible.

Building Lyrid is a huge responsibility, and we couldn’t have done it without the support of these talented group of individuals. They truly understand the value of what we’re building, and we’re so lucky to have them on the team.

Investment Updates

Within the final month of 2022, we have closed our Pre-Seed funding round. We are excited to announce that we have successfully raised 1M with our latest investment from GoAhead Ventures:

“At GoAhead Ventures, our mission is to work with entrepreneurs at the earliest stages of their company. We are active investors who work alongside our companies and deliver tangible value. We enjoy working with students and recent graduates to help them achieve their vision. We believe in the transformative ability that young entrepreneurs possess when building a company. We have a track record of helping entrepreneurs found their startups from scratch, and we love to get involved in every step of the process. “

After learning about their mission and approach, we were happy to welcome GoAhead ventures to the Lyrid family! Lyrid is very lucky to have found partners that value our own mission of making cloud more accessible. GoAhead Ventures truly see the value that we bring to the world, and there is nothing more empowering than a group of people that believe in you. With the backing of Silicon Valley VC like GoAhead Venture, we are confident that we will be able to execute our plans for development and growth of the company.

Led by founders who has walked many miles in the customers' shoes has given us the confidence that Lyrid will bring the disruption needed to cloud infrastructure. We see Lyrid's drive for growth and we are excited about our investment! -- Clancey Stahr, Managing Partner, GoAhead Ventures

We are winding down our fundraising efforts for this round to focus more on our development and growth with current investments. However, we are open to bringing in additional investors who value our ecosystem. Please let us know if you are interested to learn more about Lyrid.

Future Roadmaps

‍1) Kubernetes will play an even more very pivotal role in our service expansion. 

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Kubernetes (often called simply K8s) are open-source platforms that work by automating container operations. Kubernetes is the base of Lyrid cloud operations. We see the need for enterprise Kubernetes is projected to increase throughout the upcoming 2022 new year, with customers wanting containers-as-a-service. We will be publishing a blog about this topic in-depth.

This is part of our future strategy to support other infrastructure types (databases, object storage, containers) managed by the platform. The goal is to help partners convert to cloud agnostics when deploying solutions.

2) Connecting the “Other” cloud providers for more choices. 

Providing our users with alternative solutions for their underlying infrastructure has always been one of our mission. And to do so, we are constantly on the lookout for partners that can give more value to our end users.

One of these partners that have signed with us is a company called ThreeFold:

Here are examples of alternative infrastructure companies that provide a different value proposition than your usual. For instance, ThreeFold’s mission is to build an open-source, peer-to-peer Internet infrastructure that removes all forms of centralization from the global IT systems—bringing the power and security of blockchain into enterprises infrastructure. We are certainly excited about the endless possibilities of running our distributed applications in a distributed infrastructure as well.

We can also bring local and regionalized partner providers to run these alternative infrastructures. Let us know if you run a managed data center infrastructure to provide more value and services to your end-users!

3) Building cloud-agnostic solutions on the platform for real-world problems.

As part of our growth, we are constantly looking for development partners that see the value of cloud-agnostic development in the solution that they are providing. For example, we partner with an open-source solution provider to integrate within the platform or a solution development provider that wants to leverage the platform to provide their end-user with choice and alternatives to what is currently available.

In the end, we are on track to build an ecosystem of applications and solutions that can run on any platform dynamically without the need for any vendor lock-in. We will provide our partners with the appropriate resources to ensure availability and cost-efficiency. 

Closing Notes

The year 2021 has been phenomenal for Lyrid, and we are bullish about 2022. We would like to thank our early believers, users, partners, investors, and everyone that believe in our mission and vision. As I mentioned from the first ever blog that I wrote, we are constantly looking for:‍

• ‍Feedback: Join our Slack channel to engage with us, let us know what you want to see on the platform and how you want us to build it.
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• Community Supporters and Contributors: Internal contributors to building on the platform or external contributors to build for the ecosystem (or both). 
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• Partnerships (Technology and Strategic): Let us know how you want to leverage our platform for your next idea or just looking for a neutral platform to house your business!
  

As always, I want to welcome anyone that wants to use this downtime to get in touch and learn more about us. Feel free to schedule a demo with us below.

Have a Merry Christmas for those celebrating, and Happy New Year 2022!