Netlify raises $30 million for a new ‘Application Delivery Network’, aiming to replace servers and infrastructure management

On Tuesday, Netlify, a San Francisco based company announced that it has raised $30 million in a series B round of funding for a new platform named as ‘Application Delivery Network’ designed specifically to assist web developers in building newer applications. The funding was led by Kleiner Perkins’ Mamoon Hamid with Andreessen Horowitz and the founders of Slack, Yelp, GitHub and Figma participating.

Founded in 2015, Netlify provides all-in-one workflow to build, deploy, and manage modern web projects. This new platform for the web, will enable all content and applications to be created directly on a global network, thus, bypassing the need to ever setup or manage servers.

Vision behind the global ‘Application Delivery Network’

Netlify has assisted a lot of organizations to dump web servers with no requirement of infrastructure. It also replaced a need for CDN and thus a lot of servers. In order to implement the new architecture, Netlify provides developers with a git-centric workflow that supports APIs and microservices.

Netlify’s Application Delivery Network removes the last dependency on origin infrastructure, allowing companies to host the entire application globally using APIs and microservices.

Mathias Biilmann, Netlify Founder and CEO, said that more amount of devices brings additional complications. He further adds, “Customers have come to us with AWS environments that have dozens or even hundreds of them for a single application. Our goal is to remove the requirement for those servers completely. We’re not trying to make managing infrastructure easy. We want to make it totally unnecessary.”

Investor’s take

Talking about the investment in Netlify, Mamoon Hamid, Managing Member and General Partner at the venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins, said, “In a sense, they are completely rethinking how the modern web works. But the response to what they are doing has been overwhelming. Most of the top projects in this developer space have already migrated their sites: React, Vue, Gatsby, Docker, and Kubernetes are all Netlify powered. The early traction really shows they hit a nerve with the developer community.”

To top it up as an icing on the cake, Chris Coyier, CSS expert and co-founder of Codepen says, “This is where the web is going. Netlify is just bringing it to us all a lot faster. With all the innovation in the space, this is an exciting time to be a developer.”

What users say about Netlify

In a discussion thread on Hacker News, users absolutely love how Netlify provides a helping hand to all the web developers in their day-to-day web application based tasks.

Some of the features mentioned by users include:

Netlify provides users with forms, lambdas and very easy testing by just pushing to another git branch

It provides the ability to publish using a simple `git push` and does all the rest of the work including assets minification and bundling.

Netlify connects to GitHub and rebuilds your site automatically when a change is made in the master branch. Users just have to connect their GitHub account with their UI.