NetApp acquired privately-held StackPointCloud in a move to boost its Kubernetes-based management and multicloud focus. NetApp will use the acquisition and StackPointCloud’s Kubernetes-as-a-service expertise to spawn the NetApp Kubernetes Service (NKS).

Anthony Lye, senior vice president and general manager of NetApp’s Cloud Data Services business unit, noted in a blog post that the acquisition was based on driving deeper Kubernetes integration into NetApp’s operations. This allows its customers to more easily manage the delivery of data and applications in clouds, across clouds, and in hybrid cloud deployments.

“We see Kubernetes as the dominant platform for modern application development and legacy application refactoring,” Lye noted in an email. “Kubernetes will win in the cloud, across clouds, and in hybrid cloud scenarios.”

As part of the acquisition, StackPointCloud will be integrated into NetApp's Cloud Data Services business.

Lye explained that NetApp's developers had been testing the StackPointCloud Stackpoint.io platform prior to the deal. Those tests showed that the developers were able to release new software 60 percent faster; spent 35 percent more time writing code; spent 90 percent less time provisioning and maintaining new clusters; and reduced time spent on common operational tasks by 90 percent.

“Because the developers love Stackpoint.io so much, after our testing I bought the company. It’s just that good,” Lye wrote.

Stackpoint.io manages Kubernetes deployments across nearly all public cloud providers. This includes Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud Platform (GCP), Microsoft Azure, and DigitalOcean.

NetApp is using that platform to provide immediate access to its Kubernetes Service as a standalone product. The platform allows customers to deploy and manage clusters and applications across clouds. This includes Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform (GCP), Amazon Web Services (AWS), and private clouds based on NetApp hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI).

NetApp will also use the StackPointCloud platform to support application orchestration capabilities of its Data Fabric. This involves integrating with NetApp Cloud Volumes, which is its fully-managed, cloud-native file storage service, and Trident platforms to allow for multicloud application orchestration with persistent storage for stateful applications that use file-based protocols. These levels of support will be offered as a value-added service for it Kubernetes Service customers.

StackPointCloud CEO Matt Baldwin will lead a team tasked with building out NetApp's Kubernetes and Cloud Orchestration Service offerings. He will report into Jonsi Stefansson, who is VP of Cloud Services at NetApp.

“Our reasoning for joining NetApp was simple: It would allow us to focus more and more on the product with more resources, more humans, and air cover from a massive company who’s intent on owning this space,” noted StackPointCloud CEO Matt Baldwin in a blog post.

StackPointCloud in May updated the platform with a dashboard for management of traffic on Istio service mesh deployments running on AWS, Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE), Azure, GCP, Digital Ocean, and Packet. It also allows users to build and manage their ARM Kubernetes clusters in Stackpoint.io.

The company last year added Bitnami’s Kubeless serverless architecture to the Stackpoint.io framework in a move to add serverless support running on top of Kubernetes. StackPointCloud, which was formed in 2014, claims more than 10,000 users have used its platform to build and manage their cloud native infrastructure.