IOpipe

IOpipe operated as a specialized DevOps platform focused on the emergent serverless computing market, offering real-time monitoring and analytics as a service. The company was founded in 2016 by Adam Johnson and Erica Windisch, who identified a critical gap in the tools available for developers building and running applications on serverless architectures like AWS Lambda. Windisch, serving as CTO, brought extensive experience in cloud infrastructure, having been a contributor to OpenStack and a maintainer for the Docker project. Johnson, the CEO, had a background in building startups and enterprise private clouds, recognizing the industry's shift towards serverless technology.

The founders began their journey at the Techstars accelerator in New York, where they validated their concept by interviewing numerous developers using AWS Lambda and confirming the widespread need for better visibility and debugging tools. This initial research shaped the development of their core product. IOpipe's platform was designed to provide developers and operations teams with deep visibility into the performance and behavior of their serverless functions, mitigating the complexities that arise when infrastructure is abstracted away. The service addressed the challenges of debugging issues across millions of ephemeral function invocations where traditional monitoring falls short.

The business catered to a wide range of clients, from startups building new services entirely on serverless to large enterprises adopting the technology for specific workloads like data streaming and content processing pipelines. Companies such as Rackspace, Matson, and Comic Relief utilized IOpipe to gain real-time insights, reduce debugging time, and operate their applications with greater confidence. Its business model was primarily subscription-based, offering tiered plans with varying levels of features, team members, and function invocation volumes, including a free tier and discounts for startups. The platform provided features like real-time tracing, profiling, custom metrics, and intelligent alerting through integrations with Slack and PagerDuty, allowing teams to spot and fix issues before they impacted users.

After raising a total of $7.38 million over several funding rounds from investors including New Enterprise Associates and Madrona Venture Group, IOpipe was acquired by New Relic on November 1, 2019. The acquisition enabled the IOpipe team to integrate their technology and expertise into New Relic's broader observability platform, aiming to deliver a more comprehensive serverless monitoring solution. Most of the IOpipe team joined New Relic to continue their work on advancing serverless observability.

Keywords: serverless monitoring, AWS Lambda, observability platform, DevOps tools, function tracing, application performance monitoring, real-time analytics, event-driven applications, cloud infrastructure, developer tools, function profiling, serverless debugging, New Relic, Adam Johnson, Erica Windisch, cloud monitoring, FaaS, performance analysis, serverless operations, application observability