MayaData and OpenEBS attract investment and partnership

MayaData vision of Kubernetes as a data plane takes off

In this blog, I’d like to provide a little more context about the news that we have attracted $26 million in additional investment and discuss our partnership with DataCore Software that includes us welcoming to MayaData a proven team of engineers with over 150 years of collective experience in building data management, storage, and Kubernetes applications.

Perhaps just as important as the investment is the progress with the community that led us to attract top investors. Bloomberg and thousands of other customers and open source users are now embracing Kubernetes itself as their data layer with the help of OpenEBS and other software from MayaData.

Yes, Bloomberg, the 2018 CNCF end-user of the year, is a customer of MayaData and an OpenEBS user.

I’m perhaps most proud that MayaData has become one of the top contributors to CNCF projects. Take a look at DevStats, and you’ll see that MayaData ranked 6th amongst all contributors as of early January 2020.
https://all.devstats.cncf.io/d/21/prs-authors-companies-table?orgId=1

What we’re doing in 2020 & Beyond

Everything we do is based on an obsession with the work that Kubernetes SREs and their users do when they leverage Kubernetes to run Stateful workloads.

The criticality of these over-worked Kubernetes SREs and their potential ability to deliver massive leaps forward in data agility to their organizations when Kubernetes is used as a data layer led us to invent the container attached storage architecture; it is why we are open source first; it is why we believe code is marketing; it is also why we have the culture that we have, PLOW.

Kubernetes SREs are not our “market segment,” they are our very reason for existing.

So what should we do next to address our obsession better?

First and foremost, this investment and the support of Insight and DataCore allow us to accelerate the development of OpenEBS. Our alpha level data engine MayaStor, the first container attached storage engine written in Rust and able to deliver nearly NVMe speeds for low latency workloads, will mature faster.

Second, we are accelerating the development of other software that we write to improve the lives of these Kubernetes SREs. As an example, Litmus just reached 1.0! As the leading Kubernetes native Chaos project, Litmus is collaborating with other CNCF projects and is increasingly used as a common framework. And the LitmusChaos Hub has been launched and is fast becoming a true hub for chaos engineering.

Third, we are “polishing the stone.” Polish the stone means that having found our MVP and started to find product-market fit, we now need to tighten every screw and add any necessary stability components because the rocket has left the launchpad. This “polish the stone” goes along with another mantra - “every customer must be a reference.” So we have invested in enterprise support systems, including ticketing and more from ZenDesk and additional analytics systems for our proactive support and managed services. Most importantly, in the last several months, we have added to our follow the sun support engineering organization, and we are adding more engineers to this and related functions as we grow.

Of course, polish the stone also applies to OpenEBS itself. We are bug quashing at an unprecedented rate, increasingly with the help of community members and, of course, the ever more powerful Litmus.

We are looking for engineers in the development of the control plane and the data engines, as well as in QA, program management, solution engineering, and more. If you’d like to learn more about our culture and our employee manual, please take a look here.

And if you are an OpenEBS Director user, then you may have noticed all sorts of improvements, including multi-user authentication and more. Learn more about project tracking on GitHub here and sign up for a free forever for individual use subscription at MayaData.io.

In short, the beat goes on. This funding doesn’t mean we change who we are. It just means we can get better at it.

We remain obsessed about Kubernetes SREs extending Kubernetes to the data layer. Customers like Bloomberg have invested in our success - and we have attracted Insight Partners and a great team and partnership from DataCore Software. MayaData is breaking away as the preferred provider of software and services that turn Kubernetes into a data layer for Kubernetes SREs and their end-users.

Please pitch in with a comment, a pull request, and any other feedback. Together we are eliminating the hot spots in the adoption of Kubernetes for Stateful workloads and are delivering the productivity and freedom from lock-in that Kubernetes has long promised.

A special thanks to all those at the CNCF and early users and everyone that has helped to build OpenEBS and MayaData - your patience, vision, and persistence are paying off.

Thank you.