Originally reported by Blocks & Files. Original announcement date: June 2020.
The Problem Kubera Solves
Kubernetes was created at Google to tame the complexity of developing, deploying, and decommissioning containers at scale. The irony is that Kubernetes itself has now become complex enough to require its own layer of operational tooling. MayaData, the open-source company best known for the CNCF storage project OpenEBS, built Kubera to address exactly that problem.
According to Murat Karslioglu, Head of Product at MayaData: “Kubera builds on our experience in supporting a community of thousands of OpenEBS users. Originally intended to be used only by our support team, we quickly learned that our users could benefit from Kubera as well.”
What Is Kubera?
Kubera is a cloud-delivered service focused on the operational management of Kubernetes environments, with particular depth around stateful workloads and persistent storage. It is designed for both individual developers and enterprise teams running Kubernetes in production.
MayaData CEO Evan Powell offered this analogy to explain where Kubera sits relative to OpenEBS:
“Whereas our OpenEBS is often compared to vSAN from VMware, Kubera provides the analytics, visualization, controls and automation for efficient operations of OpenEBS on Kubernetes — much like VMware’s vRealize Operations software provides similar capabilities to users of vSAN.”
Evan Powell, CEO, MayaData
Core Capabilities
Kubera’s feature set at launch covers four main operational areas:
- Stateful workload management: Simplified configuration, management, and monitoring of stateful applications on Kubernetes, including Kafka, PostgreSQL, Cassandra, and others.
- Backup and restore: Streamlined backup of stateful workloads whether they use OpenEBS or another storage backend.
- Dynamic visualisation and controls: Interactive visualisations of the full Kubernetes environment, with point-and-click controls for snapshotting, cloning, compliance checks, and alerting.
- Automated lifecycle management: Automated management of data-layer components, including the OpenEBS Enterprise Edition and underlying storage resources such as local disks and cloud volumes.
OpenEBS Integration
Kubera is closely integrated with OpenEBS, the CNCF open-source container-native storage project that MayaData sponsors. Alongside the Kubera launch, MayaData also made available an Enterprise Edition of OpenEBS, which is managed through the Kubera platform. However, Kubera’s backup and management features are not limited to OpenEBS storage — the service is designed to work with other storage backends as well.
Pricing and Plans
At the time of launch, MayaData offered three tiers:
- Free individual plan — available to individual developers exploring Kubera.
- Team plan — targeted at smaller teams requiring shared access and collaboration features.
- Enterprise plan — includes MayaData support for the full environment, covering OpenEBS Enterprise Edition and related components. Subscriptions started at $49 per user per month.
Context: Why Kubernetes Operational Management Matters
As Kubernetes adoption matured past initial pilots into production deployments, teams discovered that Day 2 operations — monitoring, storage management, backup, compliance, and cost visibility — were under-served by the core Kubernetes toolset. Stateful workloads in particular added complexity that basic kubectl workflows were never designed to handle at scale.
Tools like Kubera represent a broader industry effort to build opinionated management planes on top of Kubernetes, similar to the way enterprise virtualisation vendors built management layers over bare hypervisors. MayaData’s specific focus on storage-centric operations reflects their background in the OpenEBS project and the needs of the users who adopted it.
Whether you are running a small team on a single cluster or an enterprise fleet spanning multiple clouds, operationalising stateful Kubernetes workloads benefits from consolidated tooling that surfaces actionable signals rather than raw metrics. Kubera is MayaData’s answer to that gap.