MayaData launching ChaosNative for LitmusChaos and more

Today we announced the launch of ChaosNative as a separate company.

In this blog, Uma and I would like to share our vision for the companies while hopefully addressing some common questions.

We will start by summarizing what we are doing and why.  We’ll then dive into what we think the next few years will bring.Spinning off ChaosNative

We’ve decided to spin off ChaosNative in support of LitmusChaos for a few reasons:

1. Increased focus on particular customers and users

While there is a lot of overlap in users between LitmusChaos and OpenEBS - that overlap isn’t perfect.  In particular as MayaData and OpenEBS are pulled into performance-sensitive environments as the fastest open-source storage available for Kubernetes, increasingly those users include infrastructure teams.  Conversely, LitmusChaos is being adopted irrespective of the performance requirements of the environment.  Both organizations will retain our focus on listening and community - and the increased focus will help us be utterly responsive to the needs of our users.  We renew that commitment today.  

When you are leading a company or part of any team in an uncertain environment it isn’t always easy to know what piece of information to rely upon. That’s where values come in.  Our top value has always been People First - starting with our team.  We really feel that by splitting the company we enable each of us to focus and feel greater impact on what we are doing.  Uma has been leading the LitmusChaos project for over a year now - it is going well and the team and community is thriving; when asked the team said they were ready to build ChaosNative into a great independent company; their voices were telling.  

While our top focus is on end-users and customers and our second focus is on our values and the needs of our teammates, we also understand that both Chaos Engineering and Data on Kubernetes are the at forefront of 2021 and 2022 plans for many of the largest technology companies and enterprises in the world.  In a handful of cases, we’ve received feedback that it’d be easier to partner with us or to contribute code to LitmusChaos or OpenEBS (and especially OpenEBS Mayastor) if they didn’t have to check with as broad a team within their organizations.  We don’t want to put the cart before the horse - these strategic partners are only interested because our focus on users and on unblocking our teams seems to be working.  Nonetheless, these stakeholders are important to us and we don’t want our corporate structure and the breadth of our offerings to get in the way of the needs of our larger partners and customers.

What is next? 

The future is somewhat uncertain.  Here are a few things we know:

• Communities matter more than ever
• Kubernetes growth isn’t (just) about technology
• Chaos engineering is now understood to be absolutely central to achieving reliability via resilience in cloud native environments
• We are at the beginning and just touching upon what is possible and needed both in Chaos Engineering and in Container Attached Storage

We are extremely confident that our new approach will help us to innovate even faster in support of our users and communities.  

Thank you for reading and for participating in building the communities and, now, communities into which we are pouring everything we have.  Please stay in touch, keep your feedback coming, and join us at ChaosCarnival that has just gone live. In the Day 2 Keynote, Uma will cover the vision and plans for tackling the challenges around the resilience of cloud-native applications at scale for Enterprises. 

Useful links:

chaosnative.com

chaoscarnival.io

litmuschaos.io