Ready for KubeCon + CloudNativeCon 2023? Attending the show? Make sure to visit with CloudCasa.
KubeCon + CloudNativeCon takes place November 6 - 9, 2023 in Chicago, Illinois.
Read this exclusive interview between VMblog and Bob Adair, head of product management for CloudCasa by Catalogic.
VMblog: If you
were giving a KubeCon attendee a quick overview of the company, what would you
say? How would you describe the company?
Bob Adair: CloudCasa by Catalogic provides a multi-cloud data protection, migration, and
disaster recovery solution for applications running under Kubernetes. CloudCasa's
key advantage for users are that: 1) it is full featured but very easy to set
up and use, even for large numbers of clusters; 2) it is open-source compatible
and complementary to Velero, the popular open-source Kubernetes backup tool; 3)
it is fully cloud-native and cloud-integrated for easy multi-cloud migration
and disaster recovery; and 4) it has a generous free service plan, and paid
plans that are less than half as expensive as other solutions.
At CloudCasa we are entirely dedicated to providing data
protection solutions for Kubernetes and cloud native applications.
VMblog: Please
tell us about your announcement for the upcoming KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North
America event.
Adair: We have received feedback from some very large organizations that said they have
problems using a SaaS solution for Kubernetes data protection, whether because
of restricted or air-gapped network connectivity, or various legal, regulatory,
or security requirements. To address the needs of these customers, we've introduced
a new self-hosted or private instance deployment option for CloudCasa. It includes all of the features of our
popular SaaS offering but runs on the customer's site or in their isolated
cloud infrastructure, providing increased isolation and control for enterprise organizations.
We've also announced integration with popular enterprise
identity and access management (IAM) solutions, allowing use of enterprise single
sign-on with both our SaaS offering and our new self-hosted solution.
With these announcements, we're making CloudCasa an even
better choice for large organizations.
VMblog: Tell us more about who this self-hosted option is
this targeted to? Is Europe a big
market for CloudCasa?
Adair: As you might expect, many federal government agencies and contractors are restricted
in their use of SaaS solutions, and other large organizations like telcos and
financial institutions often prefer to fully control and manage their own
environments. It is mainly these organizations that our new self-hosted option
is aimed at.
We do have many European customers, and our SaaS offering
complies with GDPR and is suitable for use by EU entities. But regulation can sometimes
be uncertain, and some organizations there that tried and loved CloudCasa were
still unwilling to use a SaaS solution running in a US cloud, despite having options
for local data sovereignty. We expect the self-hosted option to be popular with
these organizations as well.
Users in our early access program for the self-hosted option
generally fell in to one of these two groups, and the feedback from them has
been encouraging.
VMblog:
Tell us more about CloudCasa for Velero that you introduced at KubeCon in
April. How has the uptake on that been?
Adair: Velero has emerged as the most popular tool and has
arguably become the de facto standard for Kubernetes backup. It has also been adopted
by large vendors like Microsoft Azure and Red Hat. We have received great
feedback and support from these industry leaders, the Velero maintainers, and
the Velero community in general since we introduced our CloudCasa for Velero
offering.
While Velero is great, deploying and managing it
at scale isn't easy. We have positioned our CloudCasa for Velero service to be
complimentary to Velero, with a dashboard for management and reporting, tools for
multi-cluster and multi-cloud management, and guided self-service backups and restores.
We are also filling an important gap by providing enterprise support for Velero,
since previously there was only community support available for most users. So far,
the response has been very positive.
VMblog: How can attendees at the KubeCon event find
you? What do you have planned at your
booth this year? What type of things
will attendees be able to do at your booth?
Adair: KubeCon attendees can find us at booth L18 in Chicago, where we will be demonstrating
our new self-hosted option along with CloudCasa for Velero. We're also excited that our partner Microsoft
will be joining us in our booth for a demonstration of CloudCasa working with
their new Azure Container Service.
This is the 5th in-person KubeCon that we have
been a sponsor of, and I think repeat attendees are starting to recognize our
distinctive pink booth color, and to eagerly anticipate our e-scooter giveaway which
has become quite popular. You may see
our CEO Ken Barth at the show taking one for a test drive. We invite everyone
to stop by our booth to pick up some cool swag, chat about data protection for
Kubernetes, get a demo, and enter to win one of several e-scooters!
##