Nimbella
I founded Nimbella to build a unified, integrated serverless platform that worked across clouds without vendor lock-in. After the acquisition by DigitalOcean, it became the foundation for DigitalOcean Functions and the serverless integration with App Platform. The architecture we pioneered, tightly integrating compute with storage and data, became a blueprint others followed, including Cloudflare.
What I built
Serverless computing had proven its value but the ecosystem was still fragmented. Each cloud provider had its own model, tooling, and constraints. Developers had to choose a vendor and accept the lock-in, or manage their own infrastructure. There was no unified layer that abstracted the complexity while preserving flexibility.
Nimbella's platform unified the programming experience across cloud providers, including enterprise on-prem infrastructure. I built first-class support for event-based applications, long-running workloads, stateful services, and AI and machine learning pipelines. The goal was to let developers write serverless applications once and run them anywhere, with no infrastructure to maintain, elastic scaling on demand, and pay-for-use economics.
I was the vision, the builder, and the operator. I designed the core architecture, led the engineering team, worked directly with customers to shape the roadmap, and drove the go-to-market. We built the kind of team where deep expertise in distributed systems, programming languages, and compilers sat alongside strong engineering generalists. The result was a platform that was technically rigorous and genuinely useful.
Timeline
Founded Nimbella with a mission to unify the serverless experience across clouds and enterprise infrastructure. Built on a decade of research and the Apache OpenWhisk platform.
Launched the developer platform publicly. Grew the team and customer base, with a focus on polyglot serverless workloads and stateful application support.
Acquired by DigitalOcean. Launched DigitalOcean Functions and integrated serverless computing into the App Platform, giving DigitalOcean a complete serverless cloud for millions of developers.
DigitalOcean Functions remains in production, a living descendant of the OpenWhisk and Nimbella lineage.