How Ngrok helps speed up application development with simplified ingress, self-service infrastructure

Modern companies manage from anywhere 200 to 1,000 apps (maybe more).

But at this scale, spending days or weeks on teams provisioning networking infrastructure can halt productivity.

Instead, advises founder and CEO Alan Shreve Skirt: “Automatic to empower your developers.”

“Enabling developers with a self-service infrastructure enables them to build and deploy applications more efficiently, without giving up their workflow,” he said.

To strengthen its platform to address this issue, Ngrok today announced that it has closed $50 million in Series A funding for its API-first entry-as-a-service platform. Shreve explained that Ngrok is a programmable network edge that adds connectivity, security and monitoring to applications without code changes.

“Traditional networking requires infrastructure teams to run legacy proxies, load balancers or VPNs, which is a slow, manual process,” Shreve said. “As developers face considerable pressure to deliver applications quickly, they need more self-service and automation.”

Facilitates application development and distribution

The way developers create applications Fundamentally that has changed, Shreve pointed out.

Microservices Architectures, serverless platforms, and other changes in the industry have led to a proliferation of new APIs and applications that require their own entry—which provides Application distribution and makes services available securely in different environments.

In typical application delivery, developers often “tap together” various open-source projects and home-grown proxy layers and connect them to disparate services from cloud-specific vendors, Shreve said. Developers must deliver redundant low-layer networking resources such as IPs, DNS, VPNs, and firewalls.

Ngrok tries to avoid that problem by decoupling the injection from the application context, allowing developers to deliver applications in the same way, even if deployed on AWS, serverless platforms. Information Center or IoT devices.

The platform unifies the “tangled web” of networking technologies into a unified layer, so developers don’t have to depend on other groups to provide infrastructure, which can delay time to market.

With a single line of code, developers can gain instant access to applications and services with authentication, single sign-on, monitoring and other key controls — and without having to provide legacy proxies, load balancers or VPNs, Shreve said.

Runs Zendesk

For example, as Ngrok customer Zendesk was experiencing significant growth, its global software engineering team faced time-consuming issues with sharing, integrating and validating applications built on developer machines, Shreve explained.

The team regularly lost days of engineering effort with slow and unreliable tunneling equipment that required a significant amount of adjustment, he said. But a small group of engineers started using Ngrok in 2015 and the app quickly spread, with engineers reporting performance, reliability, ease of use and the platform’s ability to “eliminate days of wasted effort.”

New users could be up and running in 15 minutes and collaborators had “straightforward access” to applications for testing and iteration, Shreve said. Now, Ngrok is used by over 200 engineers at a leading customer service software and sales CRM provider.

Developing next-generation applications

With no upfront funding, Ngrok is already being used by 5 million developers at companies including Zendesk, Copado and Veritas, Shreve said. The company is funded solely by over 30,000 paying customers, and top tech companies including Microsoft, GitHub, Okta, Shopify, Zoom, and Twilio recommend Ngrok in their documentation.

Additionally, the company’s team has developed and scaled software on Twilio, Okta, Google, AWS, MongoDB, Digital Ocean, and more.

Today’s funding round was held under the leadership Lightspeed Venture Partners with participation Code. Shreve said the company will use it to meet growing demand for its platform in a variety of enterprise use cases.

“As we scale, our focus remains on how we’ve built the business to date: delivering real value to real customers and empowering developers to build next-generation apps,” he said.