New Kasten K10 platform enables enterprises to build, deploy and manage containerized applications at scale

Kasten, a cloud-native data management company, emerged from stealth and released its K10 platform. K10 uses a novel application-centric approach to enable enterprises to meet business continuity and compliance requirements around stateful container based applications running at scale on public and private Kubernetes deployments.

Additionally, the company announced an open source project called Kanister – an extensible framework for application-level data management. Kasten K10 and Kanister are used by enterprises, including a top 10 retailer in Europe and a leading global telecommunications provider.

The company is backed by well-known Silicon Valley angels and executives from Google, Amazon and Facebook. These include Amarjit Gill, who has more than $2 billion in exists as a serial founder plus multiple large exists as an investor, as well as Amit Singh, founder of Osmeta which Facebook acquired, and Dan Dobberpuhl, who is a serial entrepreneur and microprocessor luminary.

Enterprises have derived tremendous business value from the agility, resiliency and portability that cloud-native platforms have unlocked. While running stateless application in this fashion has become commonplace, IT organizations are still struggling with the transition for stateful workloads which make up a significant portion of the traditional enterprise applications in production.

Having largely overcome the initial hurdles around storage provisioning in containerized environments, enterprises experience pain points related to ongoing data management and satisfying business continuity and compliance requirements which are inevitable with persistent data.

While the challenges partly stem from the fact that existing data management tools are very infrastructure and VM-focused and do not effectively translate to a cloud-native world, the primary issue is that proper data lifecycle management is at odds with most implementations of the DevOps model in the enterprise.

Operators do not have the visibility and tools to do data management at scale, while relying on developers to address these requirements with sufficient depth is sub-optimal and insufficient. The result is ad-hoc and error prone processes without clear ownership which inevitably crumble at scale, impede business agility and often lead to severe production issues including data loss.

Kasten addresses these challenges by introducing a unique application-centric data management platform. Starting with the application but also deeply integrating with the infrastructure, the solution balances the needs of both operators and developers. Operators control data protection and mobility for the entire application stack via dynamic policies and have global visibility into business requirements compliance.

Developers can choose appropriate data store and remain focused on core application logic but are able to extend the platform to meet custom requirements using Kanister when needed. As a result, enterprises are finally free to fully adopt and reap the benefits of cloud-native platforms regardless of the type of workload.

In a cloud-native environment, applications come and go rapidly and scale dynamically. Even though IT operators may not be involved in some of these transitions, Kasten K10 makes it possible to proactively define policies and data management workflows that will be triggered automatically for both existing and future applications. Kasten K10 provides a unified view of data management operations across applications in a cloud-native environment. More specifically, it enables operators to monitor the compliance metrics they are responsible for and easily identify applications that need attention.

Kasten K10 offers facilities for robust application-centric data protection. The platform captures and orchestrates life cycle management operations for both application configuration and persistent data. The Kanister framework allows for deep integration with specific applications. To truly harness the power of cloud-native environments, stateful applications need to be fully portable, including the persistent data component. Kasten K10 delivers foundational mechanisms for moving data sets and performing customer-defined transformations.

Kasten was founded by Niraj Tolia (CEO) and Vaibhav Kamra (VP of Engineering), who bring deep technical expertise in the areas of containers, Kubernetes, storage and distributed systems. Previously they held senior leadership positions and delivered multiple enterprise-ready solutions at companies like Maginatics (acquired by EMC), Dell EMC, HPE and Microsoft.

“Kasten was founded to solve the data management pain we experienced firsthand in working with stateful applications in containerized environments,” said Niraj Tolia, Kasten co-founder and CEO. “Kasten’s mission is to eliminate the friction and adoption roadblocks observed with enterprises when working with persistent state in container orchestration platforms such as Kubernetes. Our application-centric K10 platform has been purpose built to bridge both the tools and DevOps gap and reinvent cloud-native data management for the enterprise.”


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