Transforming networking for businesses, developers and end users – why we invested in Traefik Labs

At Balderton, we are very excited about the emergence of organic online communities.

Some of the most productive and powerful of these communities to emerge in the last decade have been the globally decentralized teams of developers collaborating on open source infrastructure software. We believe strongly that being open source is becoming a prerequisite for widely-adopted, high-quality infrastructure software today.

For us, the most compelling and strategic aspect of open source software is the community that drives the creation, development, and ultimately adoption of that software. Emile and his team at Traefik Labs (previously Containous), have led the Traefik (pronounced ‘Traffic’) community with tremendous success over the last few years and we at Balderton are humbled to be joining it.

Traefik is a global leader in networking software that was built natively for a containerized, service-oriented architecture. Traefik is an open-source reverse proxy and load balancer written in Go. In short, it helps companies take internet traffic from outside their applications, and route it efficiently and effectively into their own architectures. Traefik provides a reload-less reconfiguration, metrics, monitoring and advanced traffic management that are essential when running microservices. It is easy to use and easy to configure, but powerful in its extensibility and horizontal scalability.

It has more than one billion docker pulls, has been starred by more than 25 thousand developers on Github, and has more than 400 individual contributors that hail from around the world. Traefik is used in production within critical infrastructure at companies like Ebay, Expedia, New Relic, Bloomberg, Cisco, Sysdig, Credit Suisse and Talend. Thanks to the strength of its community, Containous have so far been able to scale Traefik to these heights despite limited financial resources.

We look forward to playing an active role in the community as Containous continues to evolve its core product Traefik alongside it’s newer products Maesh and Traefik Enterprise Edition, helping to transform networking for businesses, developers, and end users around the world.