The merger of env zero, a provider of an infrastructure as code (IaC) management platform, and CloudQuery, a provider of a cloud asset management platform, is being driven by an effort to create a platform engineering solution that will make it simpler to programmatically manage IT environments on an end-to-end basis.
Led by current env zero CEO Steve Corndell, the combined entity will enable platform engineering teams to manage and govern both how IT environments are provisioned using IaC Tools such as Terraform and cloud operations after an application workload has been deployed.
Current CloudQuery CEO Yevgeny Pats, to further that integration, will now serve as the CTO of env zero.
The two companies had independently developed similar technology roadmaps that the merger will now enable the combined companies to achieve faster. Rather than relying on separate tools and platforms to provision and manage cloud computing environments, it’s clear that as more organizations adopt best platform engineering practices there will be an effort to centralize the management of cloud computing environments, added Pats.
At its core, the env zero platform provides a single control plane to enable IT teams to manage and apply policies to code created using tools such as Terraform, OpenTofu, Pulumi, CloudFormation, Terragrunt or in Kubernetes environments, a set of YAML files.
CloudQuery, meanwhile, enables IT teams to detect changes in cloud computing environments that are then used to automatically apply governance and FinOps policies as changes are continuously made.
That capability will prove to be especially crucial in the age of AI when changes will be made in milliseconds by agents that will soon be embedded across the software development lifecycle, noted Pats.
Mitch Ashley, vice president and practice lead for software lifecycle engineering at the Futurum Group, said the env zero and CloudQuery merger reflects a wider shift toward platform engineering to manage IT infrastructure using a single control plane. Managing these as separate disciplines has created a governance gap that scales poorly as deployment velocity and environment complexity grow, he added.
Platform engineering teams need unified policy enforcement spanning provisioning and runtime operations, and procurement decisions will increasingly favor platforms that deliver both, noted Ashley. Organizations still relying on disconnected IaC and cloud governance tooling face compounding compliance and operational risk as automation continues to increase, he said.
It’s not clear how many IT teams have embraced platform engineering, but a recent Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) survey finds that while more than a quarter (28%) work for organizations that have a dedicated platform engineering team responsible for internal platforms, another 72% have adopted a multi-team approach (41%) or have no formal approach at all (31%).
Ultimately, the degree to which best platform engineering practices are adopted is going to vary from one organization to the next. Each IT team will need to strike a balance between enabling developers to experiment with new tools and platforms and controlling software engineering costs. The challenge, as always, is finding a way to achieve that goal that application developers will embrace rather than resist.