Cool Startup – Macrometa Launches Serverless Edge Platform and Geo-Distributed Edge Database

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Palo Alto-based startup Macrometa has recently emerged from stealth mode. They have introduced an innovative serverless edge platform that is powered by a highly-consistent and highly-available geo-distributed database. The service is available across 25 PoPs (expanding to over 100 in 2019) and runs on public/private cloud infrastructure.

As the industry shifts to cloud native applications, serverless, containerized microservices, functions (FaaS), multi-cloud, hybrid cloud, and IoT, the need to maintain state, process requests, support microservices and containers, in addition to delivering dynamic and static content at the edge is becoming a necessity.

The biggest challenge that vendors are facing today is developing the technology stack to deliver dynamic content and stateful services at the edge. The reason this is hard is because it requires the development of a global geo-distributed edge database that has strong consistency and ACID support, a problem that has confounded many.

However, a handful of companies have been working on a solution for years. Macrometa is one of these companies. They have developed a highly scalable and highly performant geo-distributed edge database that provides strong consistency and supports ACID transactions at every PoP in their network. In other words, Macrometa transforms the traditional static CDN model into a highly dynamic, interactive operational model.

Consistency, Availability and Scale

For Macrometa, if a thousand users around the world perform a write transaction at the same time and place, there won’t be any consistency issues as the system ensures that writes occur in an orderly fashion regardless of volume or location.

The Macrometa features that make consistency, high availability, and scale possible are Real-time Intelligent Convergence Engine (RICE), Geo-Distributed Event Ledger, and Geo-Distributed Streams. Each of these features performs complex operations behind the scenes and help applications run more efficiently at the edge by maintaining state, processing data, delivering static and dynamic content, and running containerized microservices. To date, this startup is one of the very few companies that are able to provide this type of service at the edge.

At the present time, Macrometa has a dozen beta customers and will be going live with an online ordering system in the next two to three months.

Competitive Landscape

As the content delivery infrastructure industry continues to evolve, something made possible by the advancements in open source software and the sharing of ideas in the global DevOps community, new business models are required to support the next generation of applications, which at this time includes containerized microservices, serverless, FaaS, cloud native apps, mobile apps, and IoT apps, to name a few. Fortunately, the once highly guarded software recipes from the likes of Google, LinkedIn, Netflix, Twitter, and many others which are being made public and donated to various foundations, are injecting new life into the CDN business models, providing vendors the ability to re-tool their entire technology stack, and in turn provide customers with a new portfolio of services.

Company Background

  • Company: Macrometa Inc.
  • Started: 2018
  • HQ: Palo Alto
  • # of Employees: 22+
  • Raised: Private
  • Investors: BGV, Partech Ventures, Shasta Ventures and Sway Ventures
  • Founders: Chetan Venkatesh (CEO) and Durga Gokina (Chief Architect)
  • Business Model: PaaS
  • Products: Compute, FaaS, Containers, Microservices, and CDN
  • Target Market: Companies running cloud native apps, containers, serverless, microservices, FaaS, mobile applications and IoT applications
  • Pricing: Based on volume
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