NetApp is on a mission to support all clouds with Project Astra, an enterprise-class storage and data services platform for Kubernetes that enables both application and data portability.

Historically NetApp has focused on three areas — public cloud, private cloud, and its data fabric — so customers can deploy services and manage and store their data in a unified manner across all of their IT environments. 

Over the last two years NetApp has shifted its focus to Kubernetes with its eyes set on becoming a leading on-premises hybrid cloud platform capable of automating infrastructure for Kubernetes.

NetApp kicked off the project six months ago to address the complications its customers encounter in orchestrating large clusters of software containers, turning to the data storage specialists for the answer to managing thousands of volumes. 

Project Astra is the next step in NetApp’s evolution to support stateful, cloud-native applications with any Kubernetes distribution across all clouds. The platform offers a normalized application data management approach that results in the  portability of data rich or stateful applications, moving them from one cluster to another. NetApp’s vision is to allow companies to work seamlessly with their choice of Kubernetes distribution on any cloud.

“I think there's a fundamental view that Kubernetes itself is going to change what people can do in it,” said Eric Han, VP of cloud data services product management at NetApp. “Kubernetes is able to blaze ahead with this automation aspect, but it's hard to run applications that are persistent in the cluster. But if we can solve it, we can bring meaningful apps into production faster.”

Storage has been one of the more difficult areas for Kubernetes to proliferate for the fear of losing a piece of data — and understandably so, as containers have continuously missed the mark on persistent data. Each container acts as a physical server or virtual machine (VM) where all applications have a little piece of data. This eliminates the opportunity to manage a single storage volume. 

“That mapping or that management, that's the part that Astra wants to illustrate, and no longer should we think of it as applications and data, we should think of it as app data management,” explained Han. 

Application data management is made up of three phases, according to Han. Getting a volume and/or transporting it is phase one. The second phase is the lifecycle of the volume and any requirements around encryption. Phase three, and specifically what NetApp wants to illustrate with Project Astra, is the ability to restore a full stack, storage volume and application included.

“If I can do all those things across all clusters, coming in and out of the system, now I can start to talk about making clusters repeatable,” he said. 

With portability, cluster management can hone in on solving problems by creating scenarios to test a bug or verify a configuration. According to Han, developers can test applications regardless of location. The end result is that users can “more confidently and more reliably bring new experiences into production.”

“Delivering this as a software-as-a service experience, we can light up new experiences, and bring data to machine learning systems and public cloud systems that customers are trying to consume,” Han added.

Project Astra is currently available as a technology preview.