Stacklet this week launched its platform, based on the open source Cloud Custodian project, that lets cloud engineering and security teams codify and automate cloud governance.

The year-old startup, founded by the Cloud Custodian creators, launched last year to commercialize the open source project and help enterprises manage costs, compliance, and security across multiple clouds.

As organizations move from on-premises data center to the cloud for cost-savings and scalability benefits, they can run into governance and visibility problems, which also introduce security and compliance risks.

“The challenge is: Developers can self-service on cloud technology — and that’s a great thing,” Stacklet CEO and co-founder Travis Stanfield said. “But if you’re an organization that needs to apply uniform standards, you run into this need to control all the things.”

Rather than slowing down this move to the cloud, or solve the governance and security problems through training, Stacklet tells “an empowerment story,” Stanfield said.

“If you’re doing infrastructure as code, if you’re developing infrastructure to service the workloads at the heart of your business, you should also use a code-based solution to codify those best practices that meet your organization’s desired policies around cost or security or compliance or just good operations in the cloud,” he added.

The Stacklet Platform helps enterprises shift to governance as code by providing real-time policy enforcement across clouds. It uses automation to discover cloud resources, and then detect and notify companies about inconsistent management or security issues. The platform automatically remediates these problems, and it helps businesses cut costs by automatically right-sizing and de-provisioning unnecessary cloud resources.

The platform also includes Stacklet AssetDB, a SQL-enabled cloud resource database that provides visibility and insights into cloud resources and configurations via real-time streaming, and Policy Packs. Policy Packs are out-of-the-box, best-practices policies around cost, operations, security, and industry-specific compliance standards.

While Stacklet currently supports the big three public clouds — Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform — the startup plans to add more over time, Standfield said.

Stacklet designed the platform in partnership with several Fortune 1000 organizations. Many of these also contributed to the 5-year-old Cloud Custodian project. This open source cloud governance project has been downloaded more than 2 million times since August 2020 and is now part of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation with almost 300 contributors.

“Capital One was a big contributor, and we’ve also had contributions from Microsoft, Amazon, Cox Automotive, Transamerica. There’s a very long list of folks who have contributed to the open source,” Stanfield said.

Meanwhile, the commercial Stacklet Platform is working with seven companies in proof of concept, he added.

In January, Stacket announced that it closed an $18 million in Series A funding round led by Addition with participation from Foundation Capital and individual investor Liam Randall.