Akanda Inc

Akanda Inc. was a technology company spun off from the web hosting provider DreamHost in November 2014. The company was established to develop and support an open-source network virtualization project initially named Akanda, which was later rebranded as Astara to create a clear distinction between the commercial entity and the open-source project. Henrik Rosendahl served as the CEO, with Mark McClain as the CTO.

The firm secured seed funding from investors including New Dream Network, the parent company of DreamHost, The Fabric, Double M Partners, and Rincon Venture Partners. Akanda's business centered on providing an open, extensible, and cost-effective platform for enterprises and service providers to virtualize their networks within OpenStack cloud environments. The company offered commercial subscriptions and enterprise support for the Astara project, which was designed to simplify the creation and management of network services in clouds.

The core product, Astara, functioned as a network orchestration service designed to provision virtual network functions in an OpenStack deployment. It provided a vendor-agnostic platform to manage network functions from different providers on bare metal, in virtual machines, and in containers. Astara was developed to integrate with OpenStack's Neutron API, acting as a single control point for services like routing, DHCP, load balancing, and firewall as a service (FWaaS), thereby reducing the complexity of the networking stack. Ultimately, the project leadership role for OpenStack Astara was transferred back to the parent company, DreamHost, where its development continued.

Keywords: Akanda, Astara, DreamHost, OpenStack, network virtualization, network orchestration, Neutron API, open source networking, cloud networking, virtual network functions, SDN, IaaS networking, PaaS networking, Henrik Rosendahl, Mark McClain, data center networking, cloud infrastructure, network services, virtual firewall, virtual load balancer