A group of former employees at Rackspace has launched a startup which aims to provide management for DevOps teams using public cloud services. 

ScaleFT (or “scale for teams”) aims to allow staff to securely share and work together on multiple public clouds including AWS, Azure, Google Compute Engine and Rackspace OpenStack. Apparently the group started out as a project within Rackspace before realising that cross-platform management might develop faster in a neutral company, instead of within one of the platform players, all of whom have their own management tools.

Cross platform working

“What we’re building is cloud management infrastructure software,” said ScaleFT CEO Jason Luce, in an interview with eWEEK. “Amazon Web Services has its own platform and that’s great, but it’s not great if you don’t want to run on Amazon.”

Luce is a seven-year Rackspace veteran, who was vice president of finance at the service provider until this week.

ScaleFT plans to cover different areas of management, but is starting with access and authentication, where it aims to improve on existing techniques. 

“SSH keys are great, but deploying and managing SSH keys usually involves making a lot of compromises,” says the ScaleFT site. ”Scale Access gives your team a scalable access control solution.” The site warns that SSH private keys may have been used elsewhere and not rotated, or be protected by a weak passphrase.

By contrast, ScaleFT issues short-lived keys that last only a few minutes, but are added to an agent so that SSH “just works”.

Other management components are in the works. 

ScaleFT is starting with $800,000 of seed funding, including money form Rackspace, and also from another former Racker - Alex Polvi, the CEO of contianer-oriented operating system firm CoreOS.