Project Astra and the cloud native applications ecosystem

We are excited to see Project Astra hit a major milestone and progress to an expanded preview stage. Early access customers included leading companies from diverse fields ranging across digital entertainment, biopharmaceutical, telco, and online media. We are grateful for their valuable feedback to help improve our product and prioritize features on the roadmap.

A central tenet of Project Astra is application centricity. The lack of an agreed-upon application construct in Kubernetes and the cloud-native ecosystem makes app and data (that belongs to the app) management a challenge. We saw this as an opportunity and worked on providing a rich set of easy to use application data management capabilities from Project Astra. As we’re edging closer to general availability, we’d like to start discussing our initial application integration targets and partnerships as well as offer a picture of where we’re headed beyond. More to follow on that after a brief reminder of Project Astra basics.

Project Astra, at inception, is built upon our industry-leading enterprise storage Cloud Volumes service offerings at AWS, Azure, and Google public clouds, and our open-source persistent storage provisioner and orchestrator for Kubernetes (Trident). It also includes sophisticated application discovery and lifecycle orchestration logic to offer a hosted aaS experience delivering holistic application data management.

In subsequent versions, we’ll expand to leverage our proven enterprise-class data storage solutions on-prem, and to include the debut of an upcoming Kubernetes-native ONTAP powered software-defined storage solution. While Project Astra provides data management for all Kubernetes hosted stateful applications, it delivers the most powerful capabilities for a range of tightly integrated applications. Its application-centric approach to provide consistent data management (for example, snapshots, backup, clone, and application + data portability) for Kubernetes applications starts with building upon NetApp’s industry leading and enterprise proven data management capabilities to create instant space-efficient snapshots & clones, to backup to cloud storage, and to simply and efficiently move and migrate them across availability zones, regions, clouds, and in hybrid scenarios from on-prem and back.

It builds from there to discover and discern the relationships between persistent volumes and other components, such as configmaps and secrets, that comprise application state.  And to intelligently sequence operations to ensure application consistency when establishing point in time encapsulations of their state and storage. We’re working on deep integration with popular and leading stateful applications, such as relational databases, NoSQL databases, event streaming platforms, and continuous delivery platforms, to bring application-consistent data management operations.

Here is what some of the leading ISV vendors have to say about Project Astra:

It's one thing to stand-up another instance of your applications in some separate infrastructure, but it's a whole other matter to make sure the data that goes along with those applications (for example, large binary artifacts, relational / analytical data, and pipeline definitions) is there ready to be used. We are pleased to work with NetApp and partner with them on Project Astra to simplify application data management challenges in the context of Jenkins.

We are delighted to see Project Astra bring consistent data management to stateful applications running on Kubernetes. We are looking forward to working with NetApp on data management challenges, in particular, backup and DR, for our enterprise-ready event streaming platform used by companies to run their business in real time.

NetApp's Project Astra elegantly maps the complexity of a Kubernetes deployment into the storage fundamentals of replicate, backup, and restore. By understanding the application architecture, we can all work together to make data and storage management fit the elasticity of Kubernetes while delivering operational simplicity.

Astra is a great technology which helps simplify storage provisioning and stateful workload mobility in a cloud native world. We are delighted to be working closely with NetApp on Astra’s tight integration with the Iguazio Data Science Platform and apply Astra benefits to modern AI/ML workloads and hybrid clouds.