Edera is a company that is changing the way containers are run and secured, making isolation a reality and fundamentally transforming computing in the process. Pulse 2.0 interviewed Edera CEO and co-founder Emily Long to learn more about the company.
Formation Of Edera
How did the idea for the company come together? Long said:
“Solving complex, low level, computing challenges requires a deep knowledge of computer history, blended with an extensive understanding of cutting edge hardware and software. True innovation and industry changing technologies that will actually lead to mass adoption needs to be simple and easy to use. Using a blend of older, known technologies, with new and creative implementations and creations allows for that to exist. Additionally, our unique insight into how people actually run their infrastructure at scale in a wide variety of environment types helped us arrive at this creative solution.”
“The industry built technologies that relied on hardware virtualization, a feature that is often missing in cloud environments or is disabled in physical hardware. Our key insight is that hardware virtualization cannot be relied upon to be available at all times on current infrastructure. By utilizing paravirtualization, we can provide virtualized container services even on many cloud instance types which do not have support for the Linux KVM approach. The industry knew this was a problem, but took an approach to fixing the problem that was extremely cost prohibitive: running a single workload in a single cloud compute instance. We saw this challenge and knew we needed to turn back the clock, and think of a time before hardware virtualization existed. That is how we arrived at Xen as the original technology inspiration, and the rest is history.”
Favorite Memory
What has been your favorite memory working for the company so far? Long shared:
“Well, it’s been less than a year since we founded the company but it feels like we’re making memories every day. We brought the team together recently in Santa Barbara and that really set the foundation for our culture and collective vision.”
Core Products
What are the company’s core products and features? Long explained:
“Edera Protect Kubernetes and Edera Protect AI are our primary products today. Both deliver container isolation for the first time by using a type 1 hypervisor and a memory-safe Rust control plane. It enables security engineers to achieve multi-tenancy Kubernetes and AI workload security in a way that is secure from the start, simple and cost-effective.”
Challenges Faced
What challenges have Long and the team faced in building the company? Long acknowledged:
“When you create something truly novel and are ambitious about what it can do, people can be skeptical. The status quo is comfortable. It’s understood. It’s expected. Even when that status quo is insecure and unsafe. It was challenging when we first started sharing our technology with technologists and CISOs, because they couldn’t believe it. They had become so accustomed to things not working, not being secure, that they started to believe that container isolation was impossible. We’d often hear: “This is too good to be true.” But we believe in what we’re building and how we’re building it so we persevered. If we could get someone to listen for 15 minutes, we had them.”
Evolution Of The Company’s Technology
How has the company’s technology evolved since launching? Long noted:
“We started with a discovery by our CTO and co-founder Alex Zenla and the engineering team has been building since then. So it evolves literally every day. In recent months, its development is being directly influenced by our design partners.”
Differentiation From The Competition
What differentiates the company from its competition? Long affirmed:
“Edera uses a type 1 hypervisor to offer isolation at the container level for the first time, enabling companies to realize the original promise of Kubernetes and to move quickly to run GPUs for emerging AI workloads. No one else is doing this.”
“Instead of running containers in Linux namespaces, Edera’s platform treats a container like a virtual machine guest. There is no shared kernel state between containers, and a memory-safe Rust control plane further secures workloads. Edera can be used anywhere users run their containers (public cloud, private cloud and on-premise) and doesn’t require virtualization extensions or custom infrastructure. It’s simple, delivers peace of mind and saves companies millions in cloud costs.”
Future Company Goals
What are some of the company’s future company goals? Long pointed out:
“Our vision embodies both our technology innovation and our values. We are changing computing for the better by reimagining what is possible.”
“Being able to trust that Kubernetes and AI workloads are secure isn’t just good for the people managing those systems, but for all of us who rely on this type of security to protect our data. Containers and securing AI is where we’re starting, but this isolation technology is powerful and agnostic. We see this evolving to protect the entirety of your infrastructure.”
“From a values perspective, we believe that diversity of thought and background leads to more creativity and solving problems faster. We’ve built a diverse team and inclusive workplace from the start and are committed to sustaining that for the long term. This is about more than hiring people with different perspectives and backgrounds; it’s about using diverse technologies and methods and it’s about supporting growth for the individual and providing apsychologically safe environment.”
Additional Thoughts
Any other topics you would like to discuss? Long concluded:
“We want to emphasize the importance of container isolation in today’s AI environments. While we originally built Edera for Kubernetes, it’s clear that AI workloads running on GPUs face even more complex vulnerabilities and that work is just getting started. What we’ve built can work for AI workloads today so that developers don’t have to encounter the same frustrations they’ve experienced with Kubernetes when they deploy their AI workloads. Edera’s memory-safe hypervisor securely isolates GPUs as well as any acceleration hardware, to keep up with the demands of AI.”
