Render has announced automatic preview environments to further solidify its position as a Zero DevOps alternative to AWS, Azure and Google Cloud. The company also announced $4.5 million in an extended seed funding round, bringing the total raised to $6.75 million.

General Catalyst led the round, which saw participation from previous investor South Park Commons Fund as well as prominent angels including Lee Fixel, Elad Gil and GitHub CTO and former VP of Engineering at Heroku Jason Warner.

Render claims to offer an innovative public cloud alternative that developers love; it gives them the best of both worlds: instant setup and incredible ease of use, coupled with the power and flexibility previously afforded only by large cloud providers.

Render does this by offering an intuitive hosting platform that requires zero knowledge of servers and infrastructure and combining it with ‘powerful’ containerization technology which enables customization, cost reduction and reliability at scale.

The new automatic preview environments feature enables users to generate a complete replica of their production infrastructure for every pull request in their GitHub/GitLab repositories.

It empowers developer teams to test collaboratively with QA, product and sales teams and ship software faster and with fewer bugs.