VMblog recently caught up with Gaurav Rishi who is Head of Product at Kasten, a cloud-native data management company
that raised a $14M Series A round led by Insight Partners. We talked
to find out more about their cloud native approach to enterprise data
management and learn more about what's happening in the Kubernetes ecosystem.
VMblog: Who is Kasten, and what is your focus?
Gaurav Rishi: Kasten, focused on the cloud-native ecosystem, is tackling Day 2
data management challenges to help enterprises confidently run stateful
applications on Kubernetes. K10, Kasten's data management product, uses a
unique application-centric approach to help operations teams with their
backup/recovery, disaster recovery, and cross-cluster and cross-cloud mobility
requirements.
Founded in 2017 and headquartered in the Bay Area with offices
in Salt Lake City, Kasten has raised over $17M and is funded by Insight
Partners and a number of leading angel investors in Silicon Valley.
VMblog: Why are cloud-native technologies top
of mind these days?
Rishi: We are witnessing a transformational change in the
way enterprises are adopting cloud-native technologies such as Kubernetes. The
primary advantages of the cloud-native ecosystem include not just huge
productivity and cost advantages but also application portability in this world
of hybrid and multi clouds. As a result communities such as the Cloud Native
Computing Foundation (CNCF) have grown to over 400 members and analysts such as
IDC and Morgan Stanley are tracking that spend on this new cloud-native stack will overtake
the existing $100B annual spend on the "old stack."
VMblog: How does enterprise data management
fit into this growing cloud-native shift?
Rishi: Enterprise Data Management are critical Day 2
services that include backup/recovery, application mobility, and disaster
recovery. These have always been a core requirement for business continuity
where benefits include protection from accidental or malicious data loss as
well as regulatory compliance. However, existing solutions built for the old
stack don't fit the cloud-native architectural constructs due to fundamental
changes in the underlying assumptions including technology shifts such as
container immutability and new orchestration patterns as well as operational
changes such as DevOps, CI/CD, and the scale found in multi and hybrid cloud application
footprints.
This is where Kasten comes in with our enterprise-focused
offering of K10, a data management solution that is built for the operations
team to manage these cloud-native applications. K10 is natively built for the
Kubernetes ecosystem and uses the core principle of separation of concerns. This
approach allows the cloud operations / IT teams to seamlessly manage and
protect their data using K10 without requiring any changes to the underlying cloud-native
applications. At the same time K10 also allows for extensibility that
developers can optionally exercise for application-specific blueprints or
workflows.
VMblog:
How is Kasten's enterprise data management solution different from others?
Rishi: As stateful Kubernetes applications move into production we see
a growing number of customers looking for solutions to support enterprise data
functions. Some of the key reasons Kasten has been successful is due to our
company's DNA that has deep technical roots in data management and cloud native
technologies, coupled with a laser focus on creating the best cloud-native data
management product suitable for enterprises.
In terms of the architecture, we have a unique
application-centric approach that treats the application as the unit of
atomicity. The applications in the cloud-native world use multiple databases -
that are referred to as polyglot persistence and are instantiated across
multiple clusters/regions or clouds across various storage vendors and Kubernetes
distributions. So Kasten's application-centric approach maintains the
simplicity and portability that IT and Operations team need while operating in
this complex environment. It is also important to mention that, given our
native Kubernetes API integration, we can do this without adding another
storage abstraction or software-defined storage (SDS) layer - imperfect
solutions that add management and operational overheads.
Additionally, K10 not only abstracts the underlying
storage and Kubernetes infrastructure to maintain portability, it is also
integrated with popular relational and NoSQL databases including MongoDB, MySQL,
Cassandra, and PostgreSQL. This gives the operations teams the capabilities to
create policy-based automations that address not just frequency of actions but
are intelligent about achieving appropriate consistency levels across their
applications at scale. A simple user interface along with a Kubernetes-integrated
CLI, integrated observability and monitoring, and support for enterprise
authentication and authorization schemes such as OIDC and RBAC allows for
frictionless operations.
In summary, Kasten's strengths are built on the
pillars of simplicity, flexibility, and a rich set of capabilities that allows
the cloud operations and IT teams to have a better night's sleep.
VMblog:
Finally, what else would you like VMblog readers to know?
Rishi: Kasten is in a space that is very exciting and
growing very quickly. We too as a company are growing - not just in our
headquarters in Los Altos but also with a new R&D center that has opened in
Salt Lake City. Our customers and
partners are global and are as excited to work with us as we are since Kasten
addresses a here and now problem with a novel approach. So, if your readers are
looking for their next big opportunity, I would encourage them to check out our
website at kasten.io
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About
Gaurav Rishi
Gaurav Rishi is Head of Product at Kasten. He previous led
strategy and product management for Cisco's cloud video business unit where in
addition to launching multiple products and growing them to >$100M in
revenues, he also was instrumental in several M&A transactions. An engineer
at heart, Gaurav is on the advisory board of several startups, a computer
science graduate and has an MBA from the Wharton School.