NetApp Trident Enables Hybrid Kubernetes Workloads with Google Cloud’s Anthos

Ever wonder if Malcom McLean—the 20^th century American transport entrepreneur—knew what he was putting in motion when he first filed a patent for shipping containers back in the mid-1950s? Seventy years later, another container technology is completely revolutionizing an industry; this time doing so with open standards that are rapidly changing the way we develop, test, deploy and manage applications.

Introduced in 2016, Trident is NetApp’s popular and fully-supported open source storage orchestrator for Kubernetes. Trident completely automates storage operations through a powerful native integration that connects some of your most demanding stateful cloud-native applications to NetApp’s entire industry-leading portfolio of storage products and services located both on-premises and in the public cloud. As a modern application management platform that provides a consistent development and operations experience, Anthos is helping accelerate app modernization. Trident extends Anthos’ reach and viability as more enterprise and line-of-business applications are moving to containers.

Today, NetApp is excited to announce that CSI Trident for Kubernetes has met the Anthos Ready Storage qualification for Anthos running on-premises, which means that customers can begin deploying their Anthos workloads instead of spending cycles configuring persistent storage. Another advantage is that CSI Trident supports all major NetApp storage products and services which simplifies the consumption of storage by Anthos workloads on-premises.

In addition to CSI Trident with Anthos running on-premises, NetApp offers several options to customers who demand application data mobility. NetApp Cloud Volume Service for Google Cloud (CVS GCP) offers high performance native file services to run applications in GCP or replicate on-prem data into cloud. Those customers who wish to have granular control over their cloud storage with strict service levels and advanced data management will benefit from NetApp Cloud Volume ONTAP (CVO). All variations of customer environments that leverage NetApp storage, be it on-prem or in GCP, are universally supported by Trident.

“We're excited that CSI Trident for Kubernetes has met the Anthos Ready Storage qualification,” said Rayn Veerubhotla, Director, Partnerships at Google Cloud. “NetApp customers will now be able to deploy their Anthos workloads quickly, reducing the toil of configuring persistent storage and simplify their on-premises storage consumption leveraging the power of Anthos.”

Modern IT is constantly disrupted by unpredictable competitive challenges and as a business enabler, it’s ever so important that IT maintains high service levels through technology transitions. NetApp believes that containers are the future of multi-cloud workloads. Containers abstract the application from the underlying operating system, enabling portability and flexibility in software development. The introduction of persistent storage across various container technologies will be essential to realize the vision of data mobility. By pairing Anthos with Trident, NetApp brings enterprises that much closer to fully embracing a cloud-native future. Together, Anthos and NetApp offer a superb head start for enterprises who currently operate, or plan to run, Kubernetes applications on-premises and in the public cloud. Trident is available on NetApp’s GitHub site. Details on deployment and configuration are available in the Trident documentation and at http://netapp.io.