Life at Kubozoa
Hi! We’re Kubozoans.
We are a company focused on streamlining and simplifying all aspects involved in building cloud native applications. We aim to make it easier for developers to develop their microservices and handle all the non-functional requirements needed. We want to help teams with common and repeatable tasks so that they can increase their velocity all while producing more consistent results.
We hope to achieve this while adhering to many of the key concepts of cloud native as described by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF). Some of those revolve around resiliency, adaptability, speed, observability, automation and auto-scaling.
But we didn’t just want these concepts to be applicable to the technology we use, but also to how we work, both with our colleagues and our eventual partners and customers.
What is 'Kubozoa'?
We went off searching for word, places and things that might be able to encompass all that we want to represent… enter the ‘Box Jellyfish’ – scientific name ‘Cubozoa’. It embodied (or we could construe it to) many of the characteristics identified above.
As we thought about it further, we realized that by changing the C to a K, it could also start to incorporate the beginnings of the most commonly used container orchestration platform used in cloud native applications today – Kubernetes. A quick search on the domain name and we knew that Kubozoa had been born.
Our Logo
Once we came up with the name Kubozoa, we turned our attention to our company logo. We wanted to create something that was as simple as possible and in-line with the concept of what we want to offer our customers – a streamlined and simplified approach to creating cloud native solutions.
As such, our logo consists of only three characters that we find in coding: “<”, “>” and “[“.
Loosely coupled, like microservices, the characters combine to form the shape of a jellyfish with the head on the left and tentacles on the right. The logo can also be construed to make out the letter ‘K’ for Kubozoa.
Our Mission Statement
Kubozoa’s purpose is to continuously improve the process of how cloud native software is built, deployed and managed. Using a mix of open source projects, our proprietary framework, expanding intellectual property and processes, we seek to develop new products & solutions for our business customers at a speed and quality that is unrivaled.
Our Values & Beliefs
At Kubozoa how we work with each other and our customers is centered around our set of values and beliefs.
We want to avoid getting bogged down on highly automatable, repeatable, fruitless work activities, they are not only a waste of time, but are quite frankly uninspiring. We strive to be highly efficient and productive in all aspects of our work and it’s what we want for our customers too. This concept is a driving motivator behind our suite of products, services & processes and is rooted in how we conduct our day-to-day business.
How we embody it in our day-to-day
We adhere to the saying “don’t recreate the wheel”. If something has been done already, let’s find a way to reuse it, and if possible, we can make it better. We aim to automate wherever possible, both in business and engineering processes. We have created and continue to evolve our product suite to enable and empower our customers to do the same.
Question we ask ourselves to help guide us
Can we automate this and will it free up our (customers’) time to spend on more worthwhile pursuits? How long would it take to accomplish the same task again?
We are a team with a passion for cloud native architecture and related technologies and we understand that if our customers are to derive benefits and value from our products, services and processes, then surely we should be taking advantage of them too! (and yes, we prefer our cooking to dog food!)
How we embody it in our day-to-day
We leverage components of our own product suite in the development and extension of new internal and customer products. We believe that the best way to verify the effectiveness of our products & processes is to use them ourselves. We put ourselves in our customer’s shoes. We practice what we preach.
Question we ask ourselves to help guide us
Can we leverage a product feature as part of our own development/business process?
We spend a good portion of our lives working, thus we want our team members to genuinely enjoy the time they put in and the people they interact with. We want all of our team members to have a voice, engage in fulfilling work and actively contribute to decisions, big and small, for the company. We believe some of the best ideas are conceived by listening to the problems and needs of our customers. We recognize that we cannot do everything ourselves and seek to partner with others to collectively achieve something greater. We are of the opinion that the best outcomes happen when we approach our interactions by thinking about how we can help someone else and not about what’s in it for us.
How we embody it in our day-to-day
We put ourselves in the shoes of the people that our decisions impact, be it our employees (and their families), customers (and their end customers) or partners (and their relationships). We recognize that in order to do this in a meaningful way, then we need to know their goals, motivations and concerns.
Question we ask ourselves to help guide us
How does this decision impact/affect our employees/customers/partners? What benefit do they derive? What concerns might they have?
We maintain that at the heart of any good business are relationships built on trust and respect. Our thinking is rooted in honest, clear and regular communication. We appreciate a genuine, respectful and direct approach to interactions, even when it might be a difficult or sensitive topic.
How we embody it in our day-to-day
We foster an environment of open dialogue where all points of view can be voiced. We encourage our team to take chances and accept that failures will be part of the journey and that learning from them will ultimately lead to successful outcomes. We engage in honest and direct conversations with our customers allowing for fully informed decision making.
Question we ask ourselves to help guide us
Have I provided the other party with a clear and concise message and do my messages say what I mean? Have I left anything pertinent out?
We are software and technology enthusiasts at heart. We are eager to play with new technologies and prescribe to the notion of continuous learning. We embrace that our domain is in constant flux and forever evolving and get excited about the prospect of putting new designs, tools, better practices and technologies into use to help solve our customer’s problems.
We value the idea of playing in the sandbox and getting your hands dirty; break things – try to fix them. We firmly believe that innovation comes from a curiosity of learning how things work.
How we embody it in our day-to-day
We want to empower our team to expand their knowledge and excel at their craft. We do this through a collaborative work environment and allocating time & budget for personal development whether that be attending conferences, getting certifications or participating in hackathons. We continuously review our historical work with a critical eye to how we could make it better.
Question we ask ourselves to help guide us
Is there another technology/product/process that I can apply to solve this problem statement?
How/why does (a technology) work this way?
Based on what I have learned so far, is there any other problem out there that can be solved in a similar way?
Our Leadership Team
Ryan Pump
I have spent most of my career in the domain of consulting, software and services in the mobile industry serving some of the largest global mobile operators. I started in research & development and then transitioned to consulting and services, proposing and implementing solutions to customer problems. It quickly became evident that our customer’s needed software to address their most complex problems. As such, I spearheaded a Software Solutions team that subsequently developed innovative solutions for our customers, including delivering some of the first cloud native projects our customers had taken to production. As the team engaged in more cloud native projects, I started to recognize some problematic trends. Although cloud native architecture was solving issues related to scalability, observability and high availability, it was obvious that the added complexity involved was felt by development teams as it required broad and deep expertise across a vast landscape. The velocity of engineering teams was slower than many business stakeholders could appreciate. I began to realize that a significant effort was being spent on repeatable or automatable activities. I could see that this could hinder the adoption of cloud native architectures and needed to be addressed — enter Kubozoa.
As Co-Founder and CEO of Kubozoa, I am driven by finding ways to make the process of building cloud native solutions more streamlined and simplified. I want us to enable our customers to take advantage of the benefits that cloud native architectures provide, at a speed and quality that they have yet to experience. Probably most importantly, I want to inspire and work alongside a team of like-minded people who challenge the status quo, who are critical thinkers and always see room for improvement.
Raam Saranathan
Coming from a software development background and working as a Solutions Architect for over 15 years, I always noticed one common toil in both areas. I found that I have been repeating myself and figured that there must be ways to avoid re-inventing the wheel each time. As a Software Developer, I wanted to focus on building the logic that the customer was asking for and not have to worry about retries or log formats or code maintainability or the spin up of multiple test environments. As a Solutions Architect, I didn’t want to constantly worry about high availability, or fault tolerance or deployment tactics and instead wanted to build proper modular, highly performant, secure and scalable solutions. Modern cloud native solution design patterns address many of these drawbacks out of the box, but introduce another set of complexities like the fact that solutions need to be properly re-architected to meet the characteristics of being cloud native, the introduction of more complex DevSecOps pipelines, the retooling and replacement of conventional service monitoring strategies, and porting localized cloud applications to other cloud platforms among others. Implicitly, Kubozoa is something that I wanted to do for a very long time to address many of these complexities.
As Co-Founder & CTO of the company, my main objective is to work with our extremely talented engineering team to develop well thought through frameworks, infrastructure and other automation tools along with best practices around cloud native solutions so that developers can ‘eliminate waste’ and focus on developing business logic while delivering world class software at the same time. While working on all this, our aim as a team is to also build some cool stuff along the way and have fun.
Ⓒ 2023 Kubozoa Inc. All rights reserved. View our Privacy Policy.
Ⓒ 2022 Kubozoa Inc. All rights reserved.
