About Earthly - Building the Developer Infrastructure We Always Wished Existed

The Origin Story

We've spent our careers building cloud infrastructure at companies like Google, VMware, Digital Ocean, IBM, and our own startups. Through it all, one frustration kept resurfacing: the gap between the tools that exist and the tools that engineering teams actually need.

We've seen the chaos firsthand. Hundreds of microservices, each with their own unique build scripts, testing conventions, and deployment quirks. Standards documented in wikis that nobody reads. Post-mortems that produce action items that never get implemented. Platform teams drowning in firefighting while app teams reinvent the wheel.

We started Earthly to change that. Not with another tool that adds to the sprawl, but with infrastructure that works with the messy reality of modern engineering.

2020 Earthly founded

2021 Earthfiles reaches 5K stars

2023 Earthfiles reaches 10K stars

2025 100+ enterprise interviews

2026 Lunar launches

Meet the Founder

Vlad A. Ionescu

Founder & CEO

Vlad has 15+ years of cloud infrastructure experience, including founding Qwiet AI (acquired by Harness), authoring Earthfiles (12K GitHub stars), and working on RabbitMQ as an early core member. He previously engineered large-scale cloud systems in Google Search and Ads, and at VMware.

Vlad started Earthly to build the developer infrastructure he always wished existed. At Qwiet he helped push security left; with Earthly he's expanding that idea to all of engineering, giving teams the visibility and control needed to enforce standards, ship reliably, and keep complex systems aligned.

LinkedIn @VladAIonescu

Open Source Origins

Earthfiles: Where ItAll Started

Before Lunar, we built Earthfiles — an open-source build syntax that became the foundation of our company and put us on the map in the developer tools space.

12K

GitHub Stars

100+

Contributors

Earthfiles brought Dockerfile-like simplicity to complex multi-language, multi-platform builds. Companies like NVIDIA, Intel, Zapier, Databricks, Express VPN, and The AI Institute use it in production-critical workflows today.

While our focus has shifted to Lunar, Earthfiles remains available and actively used by thousands of developers worldwide.

View on GitHub

Earthfile

VERSION 0.8

build:
    FROM golang:1.21-alpine
    WORKDIR /app
    COPY go.mod go.sum ./
    RUN go mod download
    COPY . .
    RUN go build -o main .
    SAVE ARTIFACT main

docker:
    FROM alpine:3.18
    COPY +build/main /app/main
    ENTRYPOINT ["/app/main"]
    SAVE IMAGE myapp:latest

The Birth of Lunar

The Discovery

In 2025, we interviewed over 100 platform engineering leaders at companies like DocuSign, Affirm, Roblox, Twilio, and LinkedIn. We expected to hear about build speed and CI/CD performance.

Instead, we discovered something deeper: the real pain wasn't speed — it was chaos.

The Problem

In the era of microservices and containers, teams have unprecedented freedom. Every service can use different languages, frameworks, and deployment patterns. This freedom enables innovation — but it also creates ungovernable complexity.

Standards documented in wikis drift immediately. Manual checklists get rubber-stamped. Post-mortem action items get lost in backlogs. Same incidents keep happening.

The Solution

We realized that while the industry has built sophisticated monitoring for production systems, everything before production is treated like the Wild West.

Lunar is production monitoring for the SDLC — giving platform, security, and engineering leaders real-time visibility into how code is being built, tested, and deployed, with the power to enforce standards automatically.

A significant chunk of production incidents originate from issues that could have been caught earlier in the software development lifecycle.

— Insight from 100+ enterprise interviews

Backed By The Best

We're fortunate to be supported by investors who've built and scaled iconic developer tools companies.

Our Platform Values

The principles that guide how we build Lunar

01

Built for Real-World SDLC

Modern engineering orgs are messy on purpose: multiple CI systems, mixed languages, half-finished migrations, legacy holdouts. We design Lunar to work with that reality, not against it.

02

Fast Time to Value

Platform governance that only pays off after a year-long rollout is functionally dead. Lunar shows value in days, not quarters. Visibility first, then scoring, then blocking.

03

Developer Respect

We assume engineers are trying to do the right thing under pressure. Guardrails that ignore that reality become workarounds. We aim for guardrails that feel like help, not punishment.

04

In-Context, Actionable Guardrails

A metric on a dashboard that nobody checks is not a guardrail. The only feedback that changes behavior is delivered at the point of change: in pull requests and CI.

05

Code as the Source of Truth

Standards written as Word docs or wiki pages drift immediately. In Lunar, standards live as code: versioned, reviewed, tested, and rolled out like any other critical change.

06

Structured, Queryable System of Record

Most SDLC data lives in scattered logs and tool-specific UIs. Lunar treats the SDLC as a structured, queryable system of record for both guardrails and high-level risk analysis.

What We Don't Optimize For

Ideas that sound attractive but lead to worse outcomes in real organizations.

❌

Absolutism

Forcing every team onto a single standardized stack doesn't work. Different domains, risk levels, and legacy constraints require different paths. We optimize for consistent standards across heterogeneous stacks.

❌

Metrics Overload

More charts don't mean better control. We prioritize signals that drive decisions and enforcement. No pretty dashboards that nobody checks.

Join the Team

Interested in building the future of platform engineering?

Why Earthly?

We're a small, focused team tackling a massive problem. If you're passionate about developer tools, platform engineering, and building products that actually solve real problems — we'd love to talk.