Every software engineer knows the importance of data security, and therefore the importance of protecting the credentials that have access to data. At any given moment applications will handle potentially sensitive customer data before writing it to some storage solution, but the application will keep the credentials it uses to access this storage indefinitely. While the data has inherent business value, the credentials themselves are a big liability and require the utmost care to ensure their protection.

It's been seven years since Docker was first announced at PyCon, and containers have since inspired sweeping changes in the roles and responsibilities of DevOps engineers around the world. The performance optimizations of a shared OS with the help of an open-source engine gave many developers their first taste of production-ready virtualization; making virtualization approachable to the devs writing the applications proved to be just the kick we needed to move us into the cloud-native landscape we see today.

The evolution of software might be a story of innovation in delivery channels - the mainframe to the personal computer, hardware-specific applications to cross-architecture compilation, desktop to mobile, on-premise to cloud. These new delivery methods represented a unique opportunity for developers to reach more users with the same application. The benefits are obvious: write once, make available anywhere. We might use the word portability, then, in very general terms, as a characteristic of software: highly portable software can be written once and deployed anywhere.

Architect - a Boston-based developer platform helping teams build, manage, and deploy cloud applications - has raised $1.5M in initial funding. The round was co-led by NextGen Venture Partners and Comcast Ventures.