Configu: Who we are, why we’re here, what we aim to do with the time we have on this planet and why you’re investing your time reading this blog post about us.
In this article:
The Story of Configu
Like most dev tool startups, Configu came to life as an answer to a personal frustration we were experiencing.
Throughout our careers, both Ran Cohen (my co-founder) and I found ourselves managing application configurations, and each time we had to do it differently. Each company we worked at had its own style of configuration management.
In some companies we had to build or maintain a configuration management tool for automating the process, as a way to create an aligned management standard across the company. In others, this same goal was achieved with an infrastructure script. Yet in a third group, the process was manual and had us sifting through duplicate values across multiple locations. We were spending hours wrangling configurations, only to find ourselves breaking production or other environments due to misconfiguration.
These three methods were all costly and time-consuming and they were not a good use of the team’s time and skillset. It also made hiring more challenging, as each time we had to onboard new members to our specific configuration management style, which took time and effort.
Not only that, but even once each company decided on its own configuration management standard, we still had to deal with configurations being dispersed across multiple stores, databases, files and third-party tools, while also being dependent on a variety of different technologies. This created management difficulties, because of silos and inefficiencies that led to too many bugs and to downtime.
This lack of standardization repeated itself at each company we worked at. Even different teams at the same company had different methods for managing application configurations.
As developers who are passionate about open-source and developer tools, we knew we could fix this. We truly believe the industry can benefit from an infrastructure tool that manages configurations for you, giving the company the freedom to focus on its core business. And in today’s economic climate, it doesn’t seem that companies have the privilege to shift from their core business. Every line of code counts. They definitely don’t have six months or two years to waste on building an in-house solution.
That’s why we started Configu ✌
What is Configu?
To make it simple, Configu is configuration management-as-a-service.
Configu is an end-to-end (from developer to production through all relevant stakeholders and environments) application configuration management platform for environment variables, secrets, feature flags, and any configuration related to code.
We aspire to become the gold standard of configuration management, by providing engineering teams with a holistic set of open-source and SaaS tools to automatically handle all aspects of configuration. This shortens development and DevOps cycles by avoiding the manual work associated with configuration files. As a result, Configu can prevent critical production failures caused by traditional, complex, and manual configuration management methodologies.
The GitHub of Configurations
Why Configu? In microservices architecture, engineering organizations can no longer allow themselves to use the same solutions that were used in monolithic architectures. To preserve agility and increase velocity, engineering teams must implement solutions that remove friction that is caused by messy work processes that involve too many stakeholders. But in configuration management, that aspect is still lacking. Configu brings a new technology to this old and traditional domain, which has only become even more complex over the past decade.
This inevitable evolution is similar to the story of code management. Today, most startups rely on GitHub for code management. But this was not always the case. In the past, many companies used solutions like XDN to manage their code. Today, agile companies require solutions like GitHub. This is also the future of configuration management: a single orchestration solution that supports collaboration and provides governance of configurations.
To achieve such a bright-looking future, Configu can be used locally or as a managed service:
- With the Configu Orchestrator, which is free and open source,, developers and DevOps engineers can manage configurations faster and more efficiently by automating the configuration workflow and connecting all stores (files, secret managers, databases, configuration managers) using a single interface. It also implements the concept of Configuration-as-Code (CaC).
- With Configu Cloud’s free Community plan, teams can collaborate more effectively, be more productive, and have visibility, reliability, and security over configurations.
What’s Special About The Configu Community?
Configu’s open-source assets are part of our commitment to the developer community and they are available here (link) for use or contribution. Now, we’re also announcing that we’ve opened our Configu Cloud community tier free for everyone! The community plan provides a single unified interface for managing all your configurations of any type and from any location. This version is the gold standard for orchestrating configurations, as it incorporates configuration management best practices and turns the experience to a fully-automated one.
In addition to orchestration capabilities, Configu Cloud also provides dashboards that show you all the data you need to enable monitoring, auditing with logs and traces, tracking changes, Attribute-Based Access Control (ABAC) and test frameworks. Our advanced enterprise version also provides flexible and contextual permission systems, security, and collaboration.
Take Configu for a Spin
We built Configu to empower developers and teams. Configu is a solution that gives developers confidence to make changes in their configurations through standardization and automation, while reducing the risks of misconfigurations that negatively impact the entire business. Configu makes sure that any changes can be made easily, swiftly and in a reliable manner that prevents bugs in production. Minimizing downtime and production failures is of utmost importance and can save companies millions of dollars, and we’re here to help.
We invite you to visit our website, use Configu, and join our Discord channel for help, feedback, or to discuss ways to contribute to the open-source project. And if you like what you see, dn’t forget to star us on Github!
