Guest: Gaurav Rishi (LinkedIn)
Company: Kasten by Veeam (LinkedIn, Twitter)
Show: Let’s Talk

Kasten by Veeam recently announced support for AWS Marketplace for Containers Anywhere, along with a new channel for hybrid deployments. According to Gaurav Rishi, VP of Products at Kasten by Veeam, “If you look at Kasten, we’ve always had three use cases that we’ve talked about: Backup, disaster recovery, and application mobility.” Rishi continues, “So a lot of people look at Kubernetes also to give the promise of portability. And from our perspective, we’ve always talked about having the concept of being able to take a backup and then rehydrate it in a completely different environment.”

This is precisely what Kasten K10 has always been designed to do, make sure that containers, regardless of where they are, can be supported anywhere.

Who will benefit from this? To that, Rishi focuses on CloudOps and DevOps who are looking to make certain all of their Kubernetes-based applications they’ve deployed to hybrid locations are protected. The key benefits users will find are deploy anywhere, license portability, enhanced security, and transaction benefits. On these benefits, Rishi adds, “They have disaster recovery in place for regulatory reasons, compliance reasons. And the key benefits that I see of Kasten K10, going ahead and increasing its presence on the AWS Marketplace. We always had AWS Marketplace listings, which were for a fully featured free edition.”

Kasten is also betting big on the freedom of choice. On that subject, Rishi says, “We want to make sure that our customers do have the diversity of choice moving forward. And we already are available, for example, on the Google Cloud Marketplace. We are already listed on the Azure Marketplace, as well as on the Red Hat OpenShift Marketplace.”

Other things Kasten has in the pipeline include direct integration with EBS to include snapshooting, integration with Amazon S3 with resilience storage, integration with Amazon EKS for a seamless, easy Kasten installation, IM goal mapping so users can easily backup across regions, integration with Amazon databases, and extensible blueprints.

The summary of the show is written by Jack Wallen

Topics we covered include:

• What is the idea behind this new service?
• How is Kasten by Veeam planning to support Containers Anywhere?
• Who is going to benefit from this support and how?
• While this announcement is about AWS, will Kasten continue to offer support for offerings of other clouds as well?
• What are the other areas where you are working with AWS? Can you talk about things in the pipeline?

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Swapnil Bhartiya: Hi, this is your host Swapnil Bhartiya and welcome to another episode of TFiR. Talking today we have with us, once again, Gaurav Rishi, VP of product at Kasten by Veeam. Kasten by Veeam has announced support for AWS Marketplace for containers and a new channel for hybrid deployments. And that’s what we are going to talk about today. Gaurav, if I ask you, what is the idea behind this new service in or Containers Anywhere?

Gaurav Rishi: Yeah. Hi. So now, first of all, thanks again for having me on the show, just got to chat with you. Yes, indeed. I know it’s a mouthful, but we are super excited to be a launch partner for AWS Marketplace or Containers Anywhere. And really the idea behind this is we are seeing a big trend towards Kubernetes applications growing, but not growing just in the cloud, but also on premises. And hence this links to the hybrid deployments where you have applications seamlessly moving between these application deployment areas. And that has resulted in customers having a pin point of saying, well, I can go ahead and get my applications deployed and use Kasten K10 to protect them, but how can I seamlessly procure them? And have transactions where Kasten K10 can now work? And be licensed both for the public cloud, AWS as well as on premises, which is now for example, things like AWS and Containers Anywhere. So that’s really what resulted in us talking about Marketplace for Containers Anywhere so that we have distinguished procurement and transactions wire database marketplace.

Swapnil Bhartiya: How are you planning to support containers anywhere?

Gaurav Rishi: Containers Anywhere is obviously an interesting one, which is essentially, if you look at Kasten, we’ve always had three use cases that we’ve talked about, including on your show. One has been backup, disaster recovery as the second one and then application mobility as a third one. So a lot of people look at Kubernetes also to give the promise of portability. And from our perspective, right from the start of the company’s formation, we’ve always talked about having the concept of being able to take a backup and to be able to then rehydrate it in a completely different environment, right? Which could be a hybrid location. It could have a completely different storage class. When we go ahead and talk about the underlying infrastructure, or it could be a different Kubernetes distribution when we go ahead and rehydrate it. So all of our backups are in this agnostic format, which doesn’t tie you to a particular Kubernetes distribution or infrastructure. So that’s how Kasten K10 has always been designed to go ahead and make sure that containers, regardless of where they are, can be supported anywhere. That’s really the secret trust.

Swapnil Bhartiya: Excellent. Now let’s talk about the actual stakeholders or actually, people who are going to benefit from it, which are AWS users. So talk about what is the value that you folks are bringing to them through of course, Containers Anywhere. And also, I mean, you folks also offer, as you also mentioned, a lot of disaster recovery, your backup and other data management capabilities. So let’s talk about how all of this is going to actually help the end user here.

Gaurav Rishi: Yeah. So let, let me talk about the end users. Cause our customers who exceedingly are your cloud ops, devops personas, who are looking to go ahead and make sure that all of the applications based in Kubernetes, that they have deployed in these hybrid locations are indeed protected, right? And that means making sure that they are backed up regularly. They have disaster recovery in place for regulatory reasons, compliance reasons. And the key benefits that I see of Kasten K10, going ahead and increasing its presence on AWS marketplace. We always had AWS marketplace listings, which were for a fully featured free edition. We also were actually launched partners a while back with AWS on meter editions. So people could go and purchase cast and Kasten K10 on a dollar on our basis. But now with this AWS market for containers anywhere, there are, I would argue four key benefits that I’ll quickly list out and we can dive into it if you want to.

First is you have the deploy anywhere you can go ahead and have customers be able to take Kasten 10 and be able to deploy it across public cloud and on premises or in a hybrid scenario across multiple Kubernete distributions, not just EKS anywhere but upstream Kubernetes for example, if you’re on premises. The second one I’ll mention is license portability. This allows you to sort of go ahead and make sure once you’ve acquired Kasten K10, you can flexibly consume it. And as your workloads move between on premises and public cloud, you can go ahead and easily migrate them. The third one is enhanced security. Now, when you go ahead and put Kasten K10 into the AWS marketplace, it’s automatically scanned for vulnerabilities by AWS. That helps make sure that you have a clean image, but also for things like on-premise distributions like EKS anywhere it supports bottle rocket, quite each for, and actually customers, again, a launch partner for bottle rocket, which is an open source, secure optimized for containers operating system, right?

And that helps reduce the surface attack surface. And then fourth, which I think is very key for customers is the transaction benefits. So you can now have consolidated billing for your Kasten K10, along with other infrastructure components from AWS, which shows all of the underlying capabilities that you might have deployed. And then also AWS marketplace for containers anywhere supports private offers. So Kasten has as a part of Veeam, a very strong presence with channels. And so to be able to go ahead and make sure that we work with the existing distributors through private offers, or CPPO as it’s called, is extremely important too, and gives the benefit to the customers to be able to work through various options.

Swapnil Bhartiya: So while this announcement is all about AWS, but there are other cloud vendors also. So are you planning to offer integration because in the end, it also the testing by IBM, you folks help customers wherever they are in their journey with whatever choices they have made.

Gaurav Rishi: Yeah, no, I think so. That’s an important question. I think it always that one of the founding philosophies for Kasten has been to have the freedom of choice, and I was alluding to freedom of choice and context of making sure you can choose any storage vendor or any Kubernetes distribution. But that is also true in terms of making sure our customers have a choice of figuring out what procurement channel they need, right? So we already has tens of thousands of channels that Kasten can be procured from. And then when it comes to marketplaces, we are seeing actually public cloud marketplaces, as well as actually what you would’ve enterprise centric, private marketplaces also show up. So you can definitely expect to see Kasten available in that. And we want to make sure that our customers do have the diversity of choice moving forward. And we already are available for example, on the Google Cloud marketplace today, we are already listed for example, on Azure Marketplace, as well as the Red Hat OpenShift Marketplace. So, we do have that choice and they continue to freeze that.

Swapnil Bhartiya: Can you also talk about it maybe too early, but the work that you folks do with AWS, what are the things in the pipeline? Of course, one second, you cannot talk about Python, but basically what I’m trying to understand is your engagement is what does the future look like?

Gaurav Rishi: Yeah, sure. No, I think it’s an good question. So, Kasten since its formation, even as a startup had AWS as a key partner, and we ended up starting over the technology centric integration, right? So given that we had a backup product and we started off as being cloud native ourselves, we actually integrated across a few layers. And so first one was, we made sure that as people wrote applications about what exceedingly using block storage like EBS on the Amazon infrastructure, we could go ahead and have direct integration with EBS so that you could do snapshotting. We also integrated with EFS, which is a [inaudible 00:08:38] and then we also integrated with Amazon S3 so that you can go ahead and have a resilience store, so that snapshots can go in there. We also then integrated with Amazon EKS so that it became a seamless way to go ahead and make sure Kasten was not only easily installed.

We could go ahead and have IM goal mapping. So we’re not asking customers for credentials. And that allowed us to go ahead and make sure you could go ahead and back up across regions or accounts or clusters. And then we also integrated with Amazon databases, right? So we see people going ahead and using exceedingly managed data services. But as an example, it could be Amazon RDS. So Kasten has this concept of extensible blueprints. We’ve already offered that for Amazon RDS and the underlying engines there that continues to grow. And then we also have gone ahead and integrated and created these blueprints for databases, which people decide to install in their own AWS clusters, right? It could be Postgres, or it could be Cassandra or recently we also announced Cape Sandra, which is an operator based database that can be easily installed and operated inside an AWS cluster.

So, in addition to all the AWS marketplace points I’ve made our integrations with AWS have been across the underlying infrastructure layer, which is a part of the shift services platform model, as well as the database and the increasing number of Kubernetes distributions that can be run on AWS. So EKS, of course EKS anywhere which we will launch partners for or on premises, but also things like Red Hat OpenShift on AWS Rosa it’s called, is something that we support today. And we will continue to go ahead and make sure that it becomes easier and more resilient for customers to go ahead and work across this entire application stack as we move forward.

Swapnil Bhartiya: Gaurav, thank you so much for taking time out today. And of course, talk about this new service, new channel, and as usual, I would love to have you back on the show, thank you.

Gaurav Rishi: No, thank you Swapnil. Excited about this and look forward to coming back to your show and talking about the next big thing very soon.

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