Sealos

Sealos, founded in 2022 and headquartered in Hangzhou, China, operates as a developer of a cloud operating system designed to simplify the complexities of cloud-native applications. The company's journey began in 2018 when its founder, Carson Yang, wrote the first line of code for a project initially named "kubeinit". Recognizing the limitations of a simple installation tool, the project was rebranded to Sealos, with the vision of creating a comprehensive cloud operating system. The initial versions were sold on the Alibaba Cloud Marketplace, and through continuous iteration, the platform evolved into its current state.

The core of Sealos's offering is a cloud operating system built on a Kubernetes kernel, which abstracts the underlying complexities of infrastructure management. This allows developers to deploy and manage distributed applications without extensive knowledge of Kubernetes or the need for a dedicated DevOps team. The platform's design philosophy is "everything is an application," providing an intuitive interface that makes deploying complex systems as straightforward as using applications on a personal computer. Sealos serves a wide range of clients, from individual developers and startups to large enterprises, including the National Health Big Data platform in China. Its business model is consumption-based, where clients pay only for the resources they use, such as running containers, which can lead to significant cost reductions.

The Sealos platform includes an ecosystem of integrated services, such as managed databases (supporting MySQL, PostgreSQL, MongoDB, Redis, etc.), S3-compatible object storage, and AI endpoint integration. Key features include DevBox, a ready-to-code cloud development environment, and an App Launchpad for rapid application deployment with automatic configuration of domain names and HTTPS certificates. Sealos supports multi-cloud and hybrid deployments, offering flexibility and avoiding vendor lock-in by building on open standards like Docker and Kubernetes. The company secured $461K in a seed funding round and has been recognized as one of the fastest-growing open-source startups.

Keywords: cloud operating system, Kubernetes, PaaS, serverless, developer tools, cloud-native, container orchestration, DevOps automation, application deployment, managed databases, object storage, multi-cloud, hybrid cloud, pay-per-use, cost reduction, open source, cloud infrastructure, app launchpad, DevBox, China, enterprise software