NetApp Buys Fylamynt, Adds Major Automation To Its Spot CloudOps Portfolio

Fylamynt brings CloudOps automation to NetApp’s Spot portfolio of cloud-native services which include cloud compute instance management, virtual desktop infrastructure management, Kubernetes and container management, and optimization of Apache Spark analytics, said Anthony Lye, NetApp’s executive vice president and general manager for public cloud services.

NetApp Wednesday unveiled the acquisition of Fylamynt, a developer of CloudOps automation technology it says lets businesses securely build, run, manage, and analyze cloud workloads with little or no code.

Fylamynt is slated to become a part of NetApp’s Spot portfolio of products with a single shared code base for a wide range of cloud-native services, said Anthony Lye, executive vice president and general manager for public cloud services at the San Jose, Calif.-based company.

Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

NetApp’s June 2020 acquisition of Spot, which develops technology to manage and optimize compute instances on public clouds, marked NetApp’s move to become provider of a wide range of public cloud services separate from the company’s traditional focus on storage.

[Related: 5 Bold Statements On Transforming For A Hybrid World From NetApp’s CEO]

Since then, NetApp has expanded the Spot portfolio to include its Ocean Kubernetes DevOps technology; its CloudJumper acquisition, which gave it the ability better manage virtual desktop infrastructure and is now known as Spot PC; its CloudHawk security technology, now known as Spot Security; and its Data Mechanics acquisition for optimizing Apache Spark analytics, now known as Ocean for Apache Spark.

Fylamynt, which will likely be known as Spot Connect in the near future, rounds out the Spot platform by tying all the other products in the platform to each other and to non-NetApp technologies, Lye told CRN.

“Customers always ask me two questions,” he said. “How do we integrate Spot with other tools? How do we extend our own code with Spot? Our answer has been, ‘Here’s and API. Go do it.’ So for the last 12 months I’ve been looking at how we as a platform for DevOps can tell customers we can help them integrate Spot with other tools and extend the platform.”

Fylamynt is the answer, Lye said.

“We love Fylamynt because it’s such a refreshing approach,” he said. “It’s a low-code or no-code solution. It connects to a wide range of assets. And we didn’t want to buy a big business that we would have to dismantle. We wanted something we could integrate quickly.”

Mountain View, Calif.-based Fylamynt as part of NetApp’s Spot portfolio will be an important part of NetApp’s move to be a key provider of CloudOps for companies looking to become more cloud-native, Lye said.

“The move to adopt CI/CD (continuous integration and continuous delivery or deployment) is still early, but it coming,” he said. “Every company is a software company today. The companies and departments that have been slow in adopting CI/CD will do so. We want to be a platform for CloudOps. We want to be a service for SREs (site reliability engineers) as infrastructure becomes more and more complex.”

With Fylamynt, developers and customers will find improved integration of all the Spot services, Lye said. For instance, he said, all the Spot tools will now be able to easily integrate with Spot Security.

“But it’s not exclusive to Spot,” he said. “The tools will also integrate with other, non-NetApp tools, for example, when connecting DataDog [cloud monitoring service] to PagerDuty [SaaS incident response platform]. Even when such data may not pass through Spot, we want to Spot to be able to facilitate it.”

NetApp’s acquisition of Fylamynt was a smart move, said John Woodall, vice president of engineering and NetApp enablement at General Datatech, a Dallas-based solution provider and long-time NetApp channel partner.

“Anthony is spending money wisely,” Woodall told CRN. “I like this.”

Fylamynt and its focus on CloudOps automation will be important for things like integrating security and ransomware protection into the clouds, Woodall said.

“Ransomware now might generate a security threat that goes to a company’s ServiceNow workflow management,” he said. “With Fylamynt, the company can get an instant response without human intervention. Fylamynt is leveraging existing automation tools, and adds a lot of complementary features around performance and cost management. At scale, people just can’t keep up with what’s happening.”

Acquisitions like Fylamynt show that NetApp is changing how businesses approach the cloud, Woodall said.

“If you look at NetApp of old, the big question in its M&A strategy was, will the acquired product be around later,” he said. “With Fylamynt, Spot, and five to six others, we see they all fit into a strategy to provide the next incremental part of the puzzle. It’s not about the storage. Yes, storage is essential. It’s a foundational building block, and not easy to do. But as people continue to build public and private clouds and on-premises infrastructures, automation is essential.”