ElasticBox takes in $9M to make app deployment less of a burden

Developers have to do a lot of work if they want their applications to jump from their own computers into full-bore production. ElasticBox strives to streamline the process, and now the company has picked up some more money.

Nexus Venture Partners and Intel Capital are leading today’s $9 million round in ElasticBox. Andreessen Horowitz and Sierra Ventures also participated.

The appeal of ElasticBox lies in its “Boxes,” which wrap up pieces of applications. You bring these Boxes together to form applications, and then you can move these collections of Boxes easily from one infrastructure to another. For example, that application can go from one cloud to another.

Technology like that could be especially valuable if companies want to hit the escape hatch on one cloud and move to another — say, because of a price change. One could say something similar about Docker — the open-source technology that wraps up code in “containers” and lets developers port it whenever they want, without changing code.

But ElasticBox cofounder and chief executive Ravi Srivatsav draws a distinction between his company’s technology and Docker’s, even if he thinks they are compatible.

“Docker and ElasticBox were built for two different purposes,” he told VentureBeat via email. “ElasticBox enables you to develop, deploy, and manage applications in a modular fashion, and Docker is a container that eases deployment of those applications. Docker does enable rapid deployment of a single tier of an application; however, unlike ElasticBox, it does not facilitate deployment and management of those multi-tier apps, nor does it store your app components and development tools.”

In any case, ElasticBox has picked up customers in the United States and abroad, Srivatsav said. Netflix uses it, for example.

“With ElasticBox we are able to both create custom Boxes as well as leverage their preconfigured Boxes to deploy our internal applications, which allows us to focus on innovation instead of orchestration,” Mike D. Kail, Netflix vice president of IT operations, said in a statement.

Netflix is one of the largest users of cloud services in the world, with much of its infrastructure running on Amazon Web Services.

ElasticBox, based in Mountain View, Calif., started in 2011. It has raised $12.4 million to date. The company has about 50 employees, and the new funding should bring the count up to 75 – 90, Srivatsav said.

ElasticBox appeared at the midstage Innovation Showdown at VentureBeat’s CloudBeat event last year.