NetApp is buying Fylamynt, a cloud ops automation startup, and adding it to the Spot by NetApp cloud operations product portfolio.
This marks the fourth Spot by NetApp acquisition in the last two years, as the company tries to build a $1 billion annual recurring revenue cloud business. In June last year it bought Data Mechanics for its API-based Apache Spark job interface software and it has acquired CloudHawk for security and compliance, and CloudCheckr for cloud cost management.
Anthony Lye, NetApp’s EVP and GM for Public Cloud Services, provided an announcement quote: “The native integration of Fylamynt with Spot by NetApp will allow organisations to rapidly and reliably deploy Spot by NetApp services within their existing cloud environments. … Combined with Fylamynt’s pre-built integrations and Spot’s full CloudOps portfolio, they will be able to accelerate, optimize and automate their cloud operations infrastructure. This strategic acquisition accelerates NetApp’s overall CloudOps leadership and empowers customers to continue to enjoy more cloud at less cost.”
Fylamynt was founded in 2019 by CTO David Lee, CEO Dr Pradeep Padala, and VP engineering Dr Xiaoyun Zhu to provide a cloud incident response facility for DevOps and Site Reliability Engineering (SRE). The company raised $6.5 million in 2020 seed round funding. Financial details of the acquisition transaction are not being disclosed.
Padala said: “With our common vision to help teams deploy and run at cloud speed, we’re excited to integrate our modern cloud automation capabilities into the Spot by NetApp portfolio to ultimately democratize automation for every enterprise.”
Fylamynt’s technology provides end-to-end incident response with alerting, collaboration, and automated remediation – shades of ServiceNow perhaps. SRE teams can build automated workflows using Fylamynt’s automation facilities. It has a so-called no-code visual interface so engineers can build, run, and analyse workflows. The Fylamynt software has connectors for infrastructure-as-code tools such as Terraform, Ansible, and Cloud Formation, and services such as DataDog, Splunk, PagerDuty, Slack, and ServiceNow.
Fylamynt says that, by augmenting workflows with AI, it is a connector that automates any cloud workflow with any service and all code. Padala has stated: “Automation is key to operating enterprise SaaS at scale with high availability, but the bottleneck in building automation is writing code. We built Fylamynt to help cloud engineers codify every aspect of their cloud workflow in minutes.”
NetApp says that, as companies increasingly move to the cloud, they’re seeking automation capabilities that help them build, integrate, and run multiple services together, easily and effectively. Fylamynt adds automated incident response services to this so that cloud-native app downtime can be reduced.
Download a Fylamynt white paper to find out more here.
The backstory here is that NetApp is building out an operations infrastructure product for enterprises deploying apps in the public cloud. It reckons this is a fast-growing market with no established players and lots of innovative startups. NetApp is buying such startups and integrating their products under Spot by NetApp. Potentially NetApp could build a commanding and early lead in this market place and emerge as the dominant player.
