With the increasing deployment of Kubernetes for critical workloads, maintaining the stability of clusters has become a paramount concern for DevOps teams. Emerging from stealth mode, Chkk, an early-stage startup, introduces a solution that proactively identifies vulnerabilities capable of disrupting a cluster and provides advanced warnings to administrators, allowing them to take preventive actions.
In addition to its official launch and platform availability, Chkk has also unveiled a previous seed investment of $5.2 million, led by Sequoia Capital.
The founding team, composed of CEO Awais Nemat, CTO Fawad Khaliq, and CPO Ali Khayam, boasts extensive experience with Kubernetes, gained during their tenure at AWS, where they played a crucial role in maintaining the stability of Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service, the company’s Kubernetes offering. Leveraging this expertise, they embarked on a mission to assist businesses of all sizes in safeguarding their Kubernetes clusters.
“Our initial product is tailored for enterprises operating mission-critical applications on Kubernetes infrastructure. We aid them in mitigating availability risks, preempting incidents, and averting downtime, enabling them to operate securely and efficiently,” explained CEO Nemat.
Chkk achieves this by continuously monitoring clusters and promptly issuing alerts when potential issues that could disrupt a cluster are detected. CTO Khaliq emphasized that one valuable lesson learned at AWS was the recurrence of the same issues among customers, which were often left unaddressed. To tackle this, Chkk adopted a straightforward yet effective approach: gathering data on errors, incidents, and disruptions occurring worldwide, transforming it into availability risk signatures akin to virus signatures, and distributing them to all customers for scanning within their environments.
This approach empowers Chkk’s customers to proactively detect, identify, and rectify availability risks before they escalate into service outages.
Having launched last year, the company has collaborated closely with early customers to refine its solution before this official launch. Nemat noted, “Numerous customers have signed up, and we’ve been working closely with several companies over the past eight months as they run our product in their production environments, managing tens of clusters within each customer’s infrastructure.”
Currently comprising 15 employees, Chkk plans to approach hiring judiciously as it assesses the product’s reception in the market following its general release. The founding team is also dedicated to fostering diversity within the company, recognizing its importance in providing a broader perspective for product development and problem-solving.
Nemat expressed, “We believe in diversity, and we believe it’s not only good for us, it’s good for our customers. Embracing diverse viewpoints enables us to empathize with a wide range of customers and develop better products by considering the thoughts and concerns of individuals from different backgrounds.”
For the first year, the company bootstrapped its operations before securing a $5.2 million investment from Sequoia in May. The name “Chkk” is a playful nod to the DOS check disk command (chkdsk), with the extra ‘k’ signifying the scrutiny of Kubernetes status—an inside joke for tech enthusiasts.
