Announcing ConfigHub: Solving Infrastructure’s Configuration Crisis
For years, configuration problems have been the source of the largest technology outages in the news, including Crowdstrike, AT&T, and Fastly. Why? Because we’ve gotten pretty good at everything else in tech. But configuration, the settings that control how the world’s software infrastructure is set up and operates, has stagnated.
It turns out small errors can have massive consequences: a customer-triggered config change taking down major websites worldwide, an ill-timed update making critical apps unreachable, or a single mistaken command wiping out server capacity at the worst possible moment. It’s not that infrastructure teams aren’t skilled or careful—it’s that the complexity and fragility of managing endless files, parameters, and rules across distributed environments has outpaced what humans can reasonably handle.
A whole generation of startups was built to declare, automate, and scale configuration. But they all followed the same model—managing configurations through files, variables, and increasingly complex rules. This quickly became brittle and unwieldy.
Hello ConfigHub! It’s the brainchild of Alexis Richardson (Weaveworks, RabbitMQ), Brian Grant (Google, PeakStream), and Jesper Joergensen (Twilio, Salesforce).
The deceptively simple idea they posed to us was this: What if, instead of files and variables, we used rows and columns? What if we treated config like data? A single query would instantly answer a question like “tell me everywhere and anywhere in any stack where #bgwriter_delay is set to anything over 300ms” for hundreds or thousands or millions of instances. You could clone, roll back, or roll forward, at any scale. You could have one process for managing config on AWS, GCP, self-hosted Kubernetes, and that one weird team running a bare metal experiment in a colo.
Cool, huh? Who could pull this off? In our view, it would take a team of folks who know where all the bodies are buried in the world of software infrastructure operations and exactly how we ended up where we are today. That’s ConfigHub.
We’re so happy to be co-leading their first $4M alongside our friends at Pear, with Encoded and an awesome roster of angels. Let’s go fix what is, in fact, broken.
