NetApp has announced the general availability of its Kubernetes storage and container platform Astra. The fully managed service, currently supporting Google Cloud environments, is a software-defined platform that aims to deliver stateful storage and data services for Kubernetes workloads while also enabling both application and data portability.
With Astra, NetApp is attempting to address many of the challenges associated with using Kubernetes, including the manual provisioning of persistent storage, a lack of APIs for data protection and disaster recovery, and difficulty moving applications and data between Kubernetes clusters.
Ultimately, NetApp said it wants to simplify the Kubernetes experience and enable companies to work seamlessly with their choice of Kubernetes distribution on any cloud.
“Backup, cloning, disaster recovery, data lifecycle operations, data optimization, compliance, and security are all critical to any organization,” said Eric Han VP of product management for NetApp’s Public Cloud Services. “Taken together, these challenges increase complexity. That’s directly at odds with Kubernetes’ goal of simpler, faster and more flexible application development and deployment – a vision that NetApp Astra will help to realize.”
NetApp said Astra will also support Microsoft Azure and AWS public cloud environments, as well as on-premise environmnets, sometime soon.
