MayaData, the San Jose startup is becoming a force in the Kubernetes industry. And the timing is perfect, in that Rancher Labs, another startup focused on Kubernetes just got acquired by SUSE for $600M-$700M. The transaction is good news for the Kubernetes startup ecosystem as it shows there’s an appetite for acquisition even in this climate.
MayaData “originally” developed the popular open-source product OpenEBS then contributed it to the CNCF. OpenEBS is called “Container Attached Storage” (CAS) which was built with microservices and runs on containers. The premise behind CAS is that the traditional storage functions are broken down into component parts and those parts run on K8 worker nodes. Also, OpenEBS supports various storage engines like ZFS engine, Mayastor, LocalPV engine, and others. One important feature of OpenEBS is it simplifies the process of running stateful applications on Kubernetes.
Source: CNCF
MayaData is busy developing multiple open source products, the latest one is LitmusChaos, a toolset that allows SRE’s to “orchestrate chaos” experiments on the Kubernetes ecosystem in order to find problems such as bugs and vulnerabilities. The tool has recently been contributed to the CNCF and is now a Sandbox Project, which is “the entry point for early-stage projects” and meets specific criteria.
Source: Github
Now the important question is how does MayaData make money? Their business model is similar to Rancher Labs and others in the industry. That model can be summed up as follows: 1) create robust open-source products that solve a multitude of problems 2) donate it to the CNCF 3) attract a huge following 4) charge for services and support around those products.
Background
- Company: MayaData Inc.
- HQ: San Jose, CA
- Started: 2017
- # of Employees: 84
- Raised: $26M
- Founders: Evan Powell (CEO) and Uma Mukkara (COO)
- Product: OpenEBS, LitmusChaos, and others
- Services: MayaData provides services around OpenEBS and other products
- Customers: Bloomberg, Orange, Arista, and Comcast