policy-as-code
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Progress Chef: Why 10,000 servers need a recipe
The hard part of running a fleet of computers is getting them to agree. Progress Chef turns configuration and compliance into code - and makes a business of checking whether the machines obey.
Perforce Puppet and the Six-Week Server
An insurer needed weeks to build an environment of 30 servers. Puppet helped cut that to under a day. The more interesting trick is keeping those servers from becoming strangers.
Armory and the art of the uneventful release
Armory made a business of helping companies ship software without holding their breath. Its journey from a Belmont garage to a Harness asset deal reveals why safe deployments need more than a faster button.
Spacelift and the Button Everyone Was Afraid to Press
Spacelift’s cleverest product is not infrastructure automation. It is permission: a way for more people to change the cloud without turning every deployment into a trust fall.
The Cloud Tool That Learned to Say No
Scalr once made cloud provisioning so easy that customers asked it to stop. That failure led to a sharper idea: the useful platform is not the one that opens every door, but the one that lets developers move quickly without losing the keys.
Pulumi Put the Cloud in Real Code - Then One Customer Tried to Leave
Pulumi replaced configuration dialects with TypeScript, Python, Go and friends. The more revealing victory came later, when a customer discovered that the expensive part was not the tool - it was rebuilding everything around it.
Cloudsmith
Cloudsmith is a Belfast-founded, cloud-native artifact management platform that gives engineering teams a single place to store, secure, and distribute software packages and containers across 30+ formats. It acts as a private, fully managed registry with built-in supply chain controls - vulnerability and malware scanning, policy enforcement, quarantine, and global distribution - increasingly positioned around governing the flood of code produced by AI coding agents.
env0
env0 (pronounced "env zero") is an Infrastructure as Code (IaC) management and cloud governance platform that lets engineering teams run Terraform, OpenTofu, Terragrunt, Pulumi, CloudFormation, Kubernetes and Helm with self-service workflows, policy-as-code guardrails, cost visibility and drift detection. Founded in Israel in 2018, the company gives developers a fast, GitOps-driven way to provision cloud environments while platform and finance teams keep control over cost, security and compliance.
PlainID
PlainID is an Israeli cybersecurity company and the recognized pioneer of Policy-Based Access Control (PBAC). Its authorization platform lets enterprises define, manage, and enforce who can access what across applications, data, APIs, microservices, and - increasingly - AI agents, replacing the tangle of hard-coded access rules scattered across systems with centralized, dynamic, real-time policy decisions. Founded in 2014 and headquartered in Tel Aviv with a strong New York presence, PlainID has raised roughly $99-100M and serves Fortune 500 organizations across financial services, healthcare, telecom, and government.
Resourcely (acquired by Anysphere)
Resourcely was a San Francisco cybersecurity startup that made cloud infrastructure secure and compliant by design. Its platform paired Blueprints - self-service templates that generate golden-path Terraform and OpenTofu - with Guardrails, a policy engine written in a human-friendly language called Really that catches misconfigurations before deployment. Founded in 2022 by Travis McPeak and Aladdin Almubayed and backed by $8M in seed funding, Resourcely was acquired by Anysphere (maker of the AI code editor Cursor) in July 2025, with McPeak joining to lead Cursor's security efforts.
David Bild
David Bild is a technical co-founder and engineering leader at Resourcely, the cloud-security startup acquired by Anysphere (maker of Cursor) in July 2025. A Ph.D. computer engineer who once designed censorship-resistant networks, he has spent his career turning gnarly security problems into guardrails developers actually want to use - from overlay networking for IoT at Xaptum to secure-by-design Terraform blueprints at Resourcely. Post-acquisition he works on Fraim, an open-source, genAI-based application- and cloud-security tool. He builds from a cabin-adjacent base in Southwest Harbor, Maine, on the doorstep of Acadia.
XOPS
XOPS (legal name XperiencOps, Inc.) is a Menlo Park-based autonomous IT company that emerged from stealth in August 2025 with $40M co-led by Activant Capital and FPV Ventures. Billed as the first 'Active System of Intelligence,' its platform builds a living knowledge graph of an enterprise's fragmented IT estate and deploys a legion of goal-oriented software robots that coordinate existing systems - ServiceNow, Workday, Okta, Intune - to drive desired states across employee, device, and software lifecycles. The pitch: declare the outcome you want, and XOPS continuously converges your systems toward it, no tickets, no human middleware.
Opal Security
Opal Security is an AI-native identity and access governance platform that gives enterprises real-time visibility and direct control over every identity - employees, service accounts, and AI agents alike. Founded in 2020 in San Francisco, Opal replaces stale, checkbox-style access reviews with policy-as-code and just-in-time access so organizations can enforce least privilege at scale instead of merely auditing it after the fact.