env zero

Profile

env zero is a commercial cloud infrastructure governance solution designed as a management layer for Infrastructure as Code (IaC) frameworks. Founded in 2018 by CEO Ohad Maislish and CTO Omry Hay, the platform has established itself as a leading solution for organizations managing complex cloud infrastructure, serving enterprise customers including PayPal, Broadcom, and Paramount. The platform operates as a proprietary SaaS offering that provides unified governance, cost control, and compliance capabilities across multiple IaC frameworks including Terraform, OpenTofu, Pulumi, CloudFormation, and Kubernetes. env0 addresses the gap between what IaC frameworks provide and what enterprises require for secure, cost-effective infrastructure delivery at scale.​

Focus

env zero solves the fundamental challenge of enabling developer velocity while maintaining organizational governance and cost control in Infrastructure as Code environments. The platform addresses operational complexity that emerges when multiple teams with varying expertise levels manage infrastructure across diverse IaC frameworks without unified governance. It enables organizations to implement developer self-service infrastructure provisioning within carefully designed guardrails, eliminating the traditional trade-off between speed and control. Platform engineering teams, DevOps organizations, and enterprises with heterogeneous infrastructure needs benefit from standardized workflows, automated policy enforcement, configuration drift management, and granular cost allocation. The framework-agnostic approach allows teams to leverage preferred IaC tools while maintaining consistent governance, visibility, and compliance across the organization.​

Background

env zero was established in December 2018 by co-founders Ohad Maislish and Omry Hay. The company is led today by CEO Steve Corndell. The company has secured substantial venture capital backing, raising $41.9 million across multiple funding rounds, including a $35.1 million Series A with participation from Venture Guides, M12 (Microsoft's venture fund), and other institutional investors. env zero became a founding member of the OpenTofu initiative in August 2023, responding to HashiCorp's license change from Mozilla Public License to Business Source License. The platform demonstrates active maintenance through continuous feature releases and maintains SOC 2 Type II compliance. While the core platform is proprietary SaaS software, env zero contributes open source tools including Terratag (MPL-2.0) and maintains the Terraform provider for env zero.

Main features

Multi-framework infrastructure orchestration with standardized workflows

env zero provides framework-agnostic infrastructure automation that supports Terraform, OpenTofu, Terragrunt, Pulumi, CloudFormation, Kubernetes, Helm, and Ansible through a unified control plane. The platform enables organizations to define standardized, auditable workflows using flexible YAML-based custom flows that orchestrate planning, applying, validations, and post-deployment activities. Deep GitOps integration with GitHub, GitLab, Bitbucket, and Azure DevOps maintains infrastructure code repositories as the single source of truth, with deployments triggered automatically based on pull request events or scheduled intervals. Multi-stack orchestration manages dependencies and sequences deployments appropriately for complex infrastructure spanning multiple teams and application layers, eliminating forced standardization while enabling consistent governance across diverse technical approaches.

Configuration drift detection and bidirectional remediation

The platform continuously monitors managed infrastructure for configuration changes, surfacing discrepancies between declared code and actual cloud resources without manual intervention. Instant Drift Detection capabilities identify configuration drift within minutes of connecting cloud accounts, enabling organizations to discover shadow IT resources and security risks during initial onboarding. Root cause analysis determines what changed, who made modifications, and when changes occurred, transforming drift from a symptom into a manageable problem with clear accountability. Bidirectional remediation enables alignment between code and cloud state, allowing teams to update source code to match actual cloud configurations or override manual changes, ensuring Git remains the authoritative source of truth without requiring tedious manual code updates.​

Policy-as-code governance with automated enforcement

env zero implements enterprise-grade governance through runtime policies and deployment policies defined using Open Policy Agent (OPA), enforcing automated policy validation throughout the infrastructure lifecycle. Runtime policies regulate resource provisioning permissions, environment constraints, and lifecycle behaviors including Environment Destroy Protection, Environment Limits, Time to Live policies, and Cost Estimation validation. Ready-to-Use Policies provide pre-built governance rules addressing common security, compliance, and cost concerns such as blocking public S3 buckets, limiting expensive instance types, and enforcing resource tagging conventions. Policy enforcement operates consistently regardless of which IaC framework teams use, enabling organizations to maintain security and compliance standards while supporting diverse technical approaches across development teams.