For those of you who don’t already know us, Kasten is the market leader for Kubernetes data management. We make it very easy for both developers and operators to build and run stateful cloud-native applications by providing an extremely easy-to-use Kubernetes-native platform for backup, disaster recovery, and cross-cluster and cloud application mobility.
Kasten was founded in early 2017 and came out of stealth at KubeCon Austin later that year. From Day 1, we knew that evolving developer requirements and the fundamentally different architecture of Kubernetes would mean that data protection for cloud-native applications would have to be rethought. Not only would this require a purpose-built, application-centric, and easy-to-use data management platform for Kubernetes, it would also need to be developed for multi-cloud, multi-tenancy, and self-service requirements, which have become increasingly common. With that knowledge, and with the conviction that Kubernetes was going to be the container orchestration platform of choice, we got to work! Today, just three years but many customers and awards later, we are thrilled to not just have been acquired by Veeam, the leader in Cloud Data Management and a company that we have always looked up to, but also to announce that we are upgrading to a Platinum CNCF membership.
Given what we owe to this community, increasing our support for CNCF was an extremely important but logical decision to make, and it also shows our commitment to the broader ecosystem. As exciting as things are today, I believe the cloud-native ecosystem we are all a part of still has the majority of its growth in front of us. I remember my first KubeCon in Seattle in 2016: cloud-native technology adoption has taken off like a hockey stick since then. But I’m sure that a few years from now, we will look back at today with very fond memories of the “early” days.
In addition to developing Kasten K10, our Kubernetes-native data management platform, we will continue to contribute to the Kubernetes Storage Special Interest Group and the Data Protection Working Group in Kubernetes to help improve storage operations and promote data protection support for the Kubernetes and CNCF communities. We are also increasing our investment in Kanister, an open-source project that helps extend support for and execution of data management tasks for databases and NoSQL systems running in Kubernetes and further increase our support for kopia, an extremely fast and secure open-source tool to manage backups.
Given our focus on open source and the community, our clean-slate vision of supporting modern developer workflows by being application-centric, and the importance of making Kubernetes complexity go away, I am looking forward to seeing the team here engage even further with both the community and CNCF during this period of upcoming growth. To everyone out there, thank you for having us!
PS. If you ❤️ the Kubernetes community and want to work with it, please reach out. We want to hire an amazing DevRel advocate as soon as possible and are hiring remotely (US/EMEA preferred).
Niraj Tolia is the General Manager and President of Kasten (acquired by Veeam), that he founded in order to solve the problem of Kubernetes backup and disaster recovery. With a strong technical background in distributed systems, storage, and data management, he has held multiple leadership roles in the past, including Senior Director of Engineering for Dell EMC's CloudBoost group and VP of Engineering and Chief Architect at Maginatics (acquired by EMC). Dr. Tolia received his PhD, MS, and BS in Computer Engineering from Carnegie Mellon University.
