Cloudkick is system to manage cloud servers, such as the Rackspace Cloud and Amazon's EC2. Cloudkick provides an easy to use monitoring/alerting solution to support your production infrastructure on the cloud. Cloudkick also gives you a window into your cloud deployment by providing detailed graphs on the health of your servers, and tools to categorize and keep information about what each server is doing. Cloudkick's mission is to make cloud servers easy to use, where ever the customer needs them.
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If you only have a few minutes to spare, here’s what investors, operators, and founders should know about Cloudkick (W09).
Cloudkick timed the cloud almost perfectly. Founded in December 2008 by Oregon State alumni Alex Polvi, Logan Welliver, and Dan Di Spaltro, it built a web-based control hub to monitor and manage servers across cloud providers — exactly the pain companies felt as they spread workloads across Amazon EC2, Rackspace, Slicehost, and others.[6] It went through Y Combinator's Winter 2009 batch, launched a paid product in January 2010, and raised a modest $2 million from Avalon Ventures the following month.[5]
Then, on December 16, 2010 — exactly two years to the day after founding — Rackspace acquired Cloudkick to strengthen its cloud offering against Amazon.[2] This is a success story, and a fast, capital-efficient one. Its instructive twist is that Cloudkick's greatest strength — neutral, cross-cloud monitoring — was precisely what made it valuable to a single cloud provider that wanted the capability inside its own platform, which is why a neutral tool ended up owned by one vendor. The founders' real payoff came later: Polvi went on to build CoreOS.
Cloudkick came from three Oregon State University alumni — Alex Polvi as CEO, Logan Welliver, and Dan Di Spaltro — who saw a gap opening as cloud computing went mainstream.[6] In 2008, running servers "in the cloud" was new, and companies were quickly finding themselves with infrastructure spread across multiple providers, each with its own console and no unified way to see what was happening. The founders' insight was that this heterogeneity was permanent and painful: someone needed to monitor and manage servers regardless of which cloud they ran on.
The team took Cloudkick through Y Combinator's Winter 2009 batch, where the compressed three-month sprint pushed them to ship a real product fast.[5] They built a cross-cloud monitoring and management dashboard, opened a commercial paid tier in January 2010, and raised a small round from Avalon Ventures to keep going. The bet was on timing and neutrality — being the Switzerland of cloud monitoring at the exact moment multi-cloud became a real condition rather than a hypothetical. It was the right bet, and it paid off within two years.[7]
Cloudkick was a web-based console for monitoring and managing cloud servers across providers. Users installed a lightweight agent on their servers — whether on Amazon EC2, Rackspace, or elsewhere — and Cloudkick collected metrics (CPU, memory, disk, custom checks), visualized them in dashboards, sent alerts when things went wrong, and offered tools to manage the fleet from one place.[7]
The product's defining quality was provider-agnosticism. At a time when each cloud gave you its own siloed view, Cloudkick unified them, so an operations team running a hybrid or multi-cloud setup could see and manage everything together.[3] This neutrality was genuinely useful to customers and strategically potent: it addressed a real operational headache while sitting at exactly the layer a cloud provider would want to control. Cloudkick built the connective tissue of multi-cloud operations early, which made it both a good product and an obvious acquisition target.
Cloudkick served developers and operations teams running servers in the cloud, especially those spanning multiple providers — an early but fast-growing base as cloud adoption accelerated.
Cloud infrastructure management was a nascent but rapidly expanding market in 2009–2010, on its way to becoming the enormous observability and cloud-management industry of today.
Read the complete post-mortem, the rebuild playbook, and the exact reasons Cloudkick is still worth studying now.