Akamai Acquires Cloud Storage Company Ondat

Akamai Technologies, Inc. entered into a definitive agreement to acquire Ondat, a cloud-based storage technology provider with a Kubernetes-native platform for running stateful applications anywhere at scale. Ondat’s technology delivers persistent storage directly onto any Kubernetes cluster for running business-critical, stateful applications safely across any public, private and hybrid clouds. The acquisition of Ondat’s cloud storage technology and its industry-recognized talent is intended to strengthen Akamai’s cloud computing offerings.

“Last month we shared details of Akamai Connected Cloud, the world’s most distributed platform for cloud computing, security, and content delivery,” said Adam Karon, chief operating officer and general manager, Cloud Technology Group, Akamai Technologies. “Storage is a key component of cloud computing and Ondat’s technology will enhance Akamai’s storage capabilities, allowing us to offer a fundamentally different approach to cloud that integrates core and distributed computing sites with a massively scaled edge network.”

Ondat’s employees, including founder and CTO Alex Chircop, will join Akamai’s cloud computing business.

Akamai Connected Cloud is a massively distributed edge and cloud platform for cloud computing, security, and content delivery that keeps applications and experiences closer and threats farther away. Akamai’s cloud computing services enable developers to build, run and secure highly performant workloads closer to wherever businesses and users connect online. In building out Akamai Connected Cloud, Akamai is adding core and distributed sites on top of the same underlying backbone that powers its edge network today – spanning more than 4,100 locations across 134 countries. More specifically, Akamai is placing compute, storage, database and other services closer to large population, industry and IT centers.

Ondat, HQed in London, U.K., is a privately funded company. The acquisition is expected to close in the first quarter of 2023. Akamai anticipates no material impact to the company’s financial guidance for 2023 as a result of the transaction.

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And finally the Ondat story is over.

It was in the air for quite some time as the company changed its name from StorageOS to Ondat, tried to raise a new round, had a lay-off, didn’t plan to be at the coming KubeCon… and had difficulties.

Started in 2015, the company has raised $20 million and this small amount explained the difficulty. Akamai didn’t pay a big check and the transaction should be finalized in a few weeks but finally the Internet giant extends Ondat’s technology as it will be coupled with Linode in its Akamai Connected Cloud, a massively distributed edge and cloud platform, announced recently. Akamai had already Linode block storage and this move confirms the opportunistic acquisition. So it should give mixed feelings to the Ondat team: the company is dead but the technology will survive. The edge model is perfectly aligned with Akamai world presence with 4,100 locations.

In fact Kubernetes world shows lots of promises but small companies especially cloud-native storage ones have tough time to sign deals, the sales cycle could be long, the subscription model is not in their favor, the capacity is not very large, the number of opportunities is not so high especially in storage.

Guess what? Ondat hits a wall like a few others that also choose a safe path, Robin.io got acquired by Rakuten Symphony in 2022 but Robin is not limited to storage, Diamanti is under real pressure and was absent of the last KubeCon in Detroit, DataCore swallowed Maya Data in 2021 and Portworx got acquired by Pure Storage for $370 million in 2020.

Murli Thirumale, CEO of Portworx, has anticipated the late curve for the business and finally appeared to be the winner in that playfield. Linbit, still independent, plays in that field with Linstor and Piraeus but has also a product line for “classic” Linux based workloads outside of Kubernetes. Longhorn is an official CNCF incubating project coming from Rancher Labs, Ceph is of course present here with its Rook operator and storage giants and MinIO has jumped into this area a few years ago to provide an open object storage model.

So we reach a point where we have to ask a few key questions: Is there a Kubernetes market for storage vendors? Do dedicated cloud-native storage players can survive, evolve and grow in Kubernetes landscape? Kubernetes brings its own complexity and requirements, stateful workloads need storage, this domain calls this persistent storage, in fact the default nature of storage but not in Kubernetes, CSI has solved some needs, other elements are needed like automation and transparency but the community and users seems to ignore specific players, these famous cloud-native ones. Automation requirement invites actors to develop operators. When you attend KubeCon, you don’t find any storage or data management category, it was the case in Detroit where you find only reliability + operational continuity.

DevOps speak about datastore and a database or a NFS share are the same for them, they represent just 2 datastore for 2 different data needs, structured and unstructured. For a storage guy, a database sits above storage and a database belongs to the application layer.

For storage gorillas, they all offer CSI and even more like Trident for NetApp, and are ready for a market acceleration. They will be even able to acquire some key vendors in the domain.

The next KubeCon in April in Amsterdam will be interesting for sure but again we see the same reliability + operational continuity category, non storage at all, and a very limited number of storage players, no DataCore, no Diamanti, no Linbit, or Rakuten Symphony with Robin but Dell, IBM, NetApp, Pure Storage with Portworx, Red Hat, Suse, DDN with Tintri, Veritas or VMware and specialist like MinIO, not counting cloud service providers.