Codefresh, which offers a Kubernetes-native continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) platform, more than doubled its total funding haul through an $8 million Series B. The round was notably led by Microsoft’s M12 venture fund.

Other investors in the Series B included Viola Ventures, CEIF, and Hillsven, which was also part of Codefresh’s earlier funding efforts. The company has raised $15.1 million since its founding in 2014.

Raziel Tabib, CEO and co-founder of Codefresh, said the firm will tap the new funds to accelerate its development roadmap and go after new customers.

Codefresh helps developers to automate their application deployment to Kubernetes in as little as 10 minutes. And once migrated, those development teams can see up to 24-times faster development times.

Dan Garfield, vice president of marketing at Codefresh, in an email explained that the company typically spins out five release updates per day. Some of the more prominent updates have included deeper support for Kubernetes and Helm, which is a package manager that was developed to support software built on Kubernetes.

Codefresh earlier this month struck a deal with Amazon Web Services (AWS) to provide the Kubernetes CI/CD product as part of AWS’ Elastic Container Service for Kubernetes (EKS).

“The future is clear, Kubernetes will be the backbone of the web for the next 10 years,” Garfield wrote. “But the vast majority of companies haven't made the jump yet. Our approach is to make the adoption process as smooth as possible. As Kubernetes grows we are growing with it.”

In the CI/CD market, Codefresh competes against a number of platforms from companies like CA Technologies through its Automic acquisition, Electric Cloud, Harness.io, and Spinnaker.

Garfield said the company differentiates itself in the market by covering a larger portion of the DevOps lifecycle.

“We can see who made the commit, jump straight to the commit in Git, and see all of the ways an image was validated,” Garfield explained. “This kind of thing is very difficult to achieve when you've stitched together lots of tools to accomplish your CI/CD pipeline.”

Spinnaker in particular has garnered some traction over the past several months.

The platform was initially developed by Netflix as a multi-cloud CI/CD platform to help with its migration of content to the public cloud. Spinnaker gained momentum last year when Google announced official plans to invest resources into the platform tied to native Kubernetes support and integration with its cloud platform (GCP).

Mirantis recently launched a beta program based on Spinnaker. It’s designed to ease the migration of existing workloads to public cloud environments like AWS or Google Compute Engine (GCE).

Codefresh, in recognizing Spinnaker’s traction, earlier this month released a blog post pointing out the differences between the two platforms. The big takeaways were that Codefresh is a better solution for companies looking to deploy applications to Kubernetes or Helm, while Spinnaker makes more sense for those organizations already invested in Jenkins that want to deploy virtual machines (VMs) to multiple clouds at the same time.

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