MayaData’s secret 5 step plan for world domination

It will be my pleasure to share with you about our stories and strategies. Why? Because of transparency! And precisely so the broader community can better anticipate where we are headed and why.

You can read more about our announcements including the launch of MayaOnline here and the release version 0.5 of OpenEBS, the leading containerized storage for containers open source project, here.

We are happy to chat directly with anyone, and you can find us on the OpenEBS community: https://openebs-community.slack.com or on twitter at @uma_mukkara and @epowell101

So here’s our 5 secret steps plan for world domination:

1. Fight lock-in, enable choice:

We think the oft-discussed shift to listening to developers is profound and long overdue. After all, they actually write the software and build the systems that deliver the value. So we give developers, and DevOps teams unmatched control over their storage without any headache. And they know how it works because it is open source.

Transparency builds trust.

However, fighting lock-in through an open source model is no longer enough. Increasingly, cloud is the new lock-in. Thankfully, Kubernetes is addressing cloud lock-in at higher layers by providing what has fast become a defacto standard means of orchestrating workloads. Clouds are now competing to show how well Kubernetes runs on them-which is a bit ironic because Kubernetes is fundamental to fixing cloud lock-in and hence should lead to cloud commoditization.

However, data gravity exists.

We help users address cloud-lock through our data mobility capabilities such as MayaOnline’s cMotion, which requires the power of OpenEBS plus the intelligence and visibility of Maya.

2. Out listen everybody:

At MayaData “Product Management” is a team sport. We believe that the community gives us an unequaled chance to out learn any proprietary vendor. If you don’t believe in open source, we will just say — hi, it is the 21st century, welcome!

In all things, we will seek to bring the community, users, and contributors into the decision making process. Sometimes, that process will be out of our control, and that’s okay.

Speaking of which, we are happy members of the Linux Foundation and the Cloud Native Foundation. We are also interested in possibly contributing OpenEBS to an open source foundation. We have had brief chats with users and are open to ideas. We cherish the feedback we are receiving already from the storage experts that hang out in the Kubernetes storage SIG and especially from the tens of thousands of OpenEBS users.

Also, you may have noticed we built an entire product called MayaOnline to listen to how OpenEBS and Kubernetes and the workloads themselves are performing. We use software to help us listen better. Ah, data!

3. Out code them too:

As of early December 2017, we added 50+ engineers to this mission, many of whom already built an enterprise-class containerized storage solution over the last 4–5 years. So while our existing product was built on BSD jails, and OpenEBS is built on Linux containers, we know what it means to put into user space a fully functional storage system.

Maybe that’s why OpenEBS is the only truly containerized storage solution available today — while our proprietary competitors claim to run on any cloud, in fact, they require a special OS build to work. Kernel hacks are the kind of technical debt you cannot pay off easily — so we have done the hard work of genuinely being containerized, thanks to putting enterprise-class storage capabilities in the user space

We will at least double that force of 50+ engineers. And already we see more than 4x as many external contributors as internal on the OpenEBS community. In 12 months there will be more than 400 contributors to OpenEBS — that’s a huge force for a focused effort.

You can do a lot with hundreds of storage and DevOps engineers. Stay tuned. We are accelerating. Join us!!!

4. Compete:

As the tone above suggests, we are working to ensure that our approach is fundamentally superior to prior approaches of managing data in containerized environments. While we have been relatively quiet in the past, now that OpenEBS is maturing and Maya is attracting early users, we intend to lead proudly.

Code is more important than marketing.

We will at least double that force of 50+ engineers. And already we see more than 4x as many external contributors as internal on the OpenEBS community. In 12 months there will be more than 400 contributors to OpenEBS — that’s a huge force for a focused effort.

However, we will not be out marketed. We will not be out partnered. And thanks to Maya and the intelligence it shares with us as well as our customers we will not be out learned. It all comes down to having more successful users achieving outcomes they simply cannot with older approaches. User advocacy is our north star, our key metric.

5. The end of the beginning:

So that’s most of the secret plan.

We know we are dealing with enterprise data. It has to be made safe and secure while also being trivial to manage and move. We intend to earn your trust through transparency and unrelenting and accelerating execution.

Thank you for your feedback and for being MayaOnline and of course OpenEBS users!

Evan Powell, CEO & Chairman

Uma Mukkara , COO

This article was first published on Jan 4, 2018 on MayaData's Medium Account