Cisco Systems is acquiring Banzai Cloud Zrt, a software company that specializes in end-to-end cloud-native application development, deployment, runtime and security workflows, Cisco says. Poke around the Banzai Cloud website, and you'll find detailed information about the company's Kubernetes expertise. Financial terms of the acquisition were not disclosed.

This is M&A deal number 471 that ChannelE2E has tracked so far in 2020. See the complete M&A deal list here.

Banzai Cloud in 2018 raised $2.5 million in seed funding led by PortfoLion, a Central European venture capital and private equity fund. FastVentures and Euroventures of Budapest also participated in that round. The latter is an angel investor that has backed Banzai Cloud since its foundation in 2017.

The Banzai Cloud team will join Cisco's Emerging Technologies and Incubation group, where they will assist in incubating new projects for cloud-native networking, security and edge computing environments for modern distributed applications, according to a blog from Liz Centoni, senior VP and GM of IoT at Cisco. The acquisition is expected to close by the end of Cisco’s second quarter of FY’21, she added.

Banzai Cloud, founded in 2017, is based in Budapest, Hungary. The company's branded product and service offerings include:

  • Backyards, which operationalizes the service mesh to "bring deep observability, convenient management, and policy-based security to modern container-based applications."
  • Banzai Cloud Pipeline "automates cluster management for effective day-1 and day-2 operations on-prem and in the clouds."
  • Banzai Cloud One Eye brings "observability for multi-cluster Kubernetes infrastructures to automate the collection, correlation, and storage of logs and metrics."
  • Banzai Cloud Supertubes lets "you easily operate your own production-grade Apache Kafka clusters on Kubernetes, leveraging the Cloud Native technology stack."
  • Banzai Cloud Pipeline Kubernetes Engine (PKE) is a "simple, secure and powerful CNCF certified Kubernetes distribution, the preferred Kubernetes run-time of the Pipeline platform. It was designed to work on any cloud, VM or on bare metal nodes to provide a scalable and secure foundation for private clouds."
  • Bank-Vaults, which "makes enterprise-grade security attainable on Kubernetes."
  • The Banzai Cloud Logging operator "automatically deploys, configures, and secures the Fluent-based logging infrastructure and enables convenient CRD-driven centralized log collection on Kubernetes."
  • The Banzai Cloud Kafka operator "installs, manages and right-scales Kafka on Kubernetes automatically. It also provides advanced security, self-healing and automatic adaptation based on run-time metrics from Prometheus."
  • The Banzai Cloud Istio operator "automates the installation, upgrade, and operation of the Istio service mesh on Kubernetes."

This is Cisco's second Kubernetes cloud-related acquisition in recent weeks. The other deal involved Portshift, which develops a Kubernetes-native security platform for application containers.