Few people start coding because they like debugging, but since there is no perfect code, problems inevitably arise. Israeli start-up Rookout is attacking one aspect of this problem by helping developers locate problems in production code without forcing developers to do additional coding to write additional tests and redeploy their applications. As the company announced today, it has raised $ 4.2 million in seed funding from TLV Partners and Emerge.
The co-founders of Rookout Ou Weis and Liran Haimovitch said that their own experience in writing the code had led them to launch this project. Weis, who assumed the role of CEO, Haimovitch being the technical director, noted that only a few years ago, your code would work in its own box and you would have complete control over it. Nowadays, however, your code can run in multiple locations and it is virtually impossible to access the full state of an application. Thus, when bugs appear in production – as is often the case, despite all the testing done throughout the development process – debugging becomes a real pain point.
The Rookout solution is to instrument the code with "stop points that do not break". For this to work, you connect the Rookout Online IDE with your code repository on GitHub, Bitbucket or another git hosting service. file system). The IDE will pull the code and let you browse it. Developers usually have an idea of the location of a bug. When you get to the suspicious file, you use the Rookout visual rules editor to set your virtual stopping point. Once the production code runs again, all data is automatically pushed into the IDE so that you can examine the entire trace of the stack right up to the point. where you have defined the stop point.
All of this works for code written in Python and Node.js, as well as for Java Virtual Machine (JVM) languages like Scala or Kotlin. For environments, the service currently works for code deployed on AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, and local servers, where it can also be used with serverless and containerized applications.
While Rookout is focused on data collection, the team was pretty clear that Rookout does not want to be a tool for monitoring application performance. You can, however, transfer your Rookout data to this type of tool.
Weis and Haimovitch tell me that the company now has 14 employees and "dozens" of customers in the pipeline. For the future, the team plans to add support for Go and other languages as requests come in, and gradually add more IDE support. .
As in many startups, the founders are still working on their pricing model. The current plan is to focus on the number of hosts used by a company, although this may still change.