Source: containerjournal.com (original coverage, July 2019)
NetApp Brings Kubernetes Automation to Its HCI Platform
NetApp announced the general availability of NetApp Kubernetes Service on NetApp HCI, a service that automates the deployment and lifecycle management of Kubernetes clusters directly within the NetApp hyper-converged infrastructure (HCI) platform. The announcement extended NetApp’s broader Cloud Data Services portfolio to on-premises HCI deployments.
According to Ingo Fuchs, chief technologist for cloud and DevOps at NetApp at the time, the service includes an application orchestration tool and access to a NetApp-curated application marketplace, giving platform teams a streamlined path from bare HCI hardware to running containerized workloads.
What Was Included in the Release
- NetApp Kubernetes Service on NetApp HCI: Automated Kubernetes cluster provisioning and management on-premises.
- Cloud Volumes on NetApp HCI: Persistent, cloud-native storage volumes made available across major public cloud providers, enabling a consistent storage layer for hybrid workloads.
- NetApp-curated application marketplace: Pre-validated application bundles accessible from within the Kubernetes service.
The combination of these services was positioned as the foundation of a NetApp Data Fabric — a unified approach to managing data across on-premises and public cloud environments without treating each environment as a silo.
The Role of CSI and Persistent Storage
A key theme in NetApp’s messaging was the maturation of the Container Storage Interface (CSI), the standardized API that allows Kubernetes to interact with storage providers in a vendor-neutral way. As CSI adoption grew, it became progressively easier to attach enterprise-grade persistent storage to Kubernetes workloads without writing platform-specific integrations.
This matters because the first generation of containerized applications was predominantly stateless — they could be destroyed and rescheduled without needing to persist data. The subsequent wave of containerized workloads, however, increasingly included stateful applications such as databases, message queues, and analytics engines that require reliable, performant persistent storage. HCI platforms, which tightly couple compute and storage resources, are a natural fit for these workloads.
Trident: Open Source Persistent Volume Orchestration
NetApp’s open source project Trident underpins much of this storage integration. Trident is a dynamic storage provisioner for Kubernetes that integrates natively with the Persistent Volume (PV) subsystem. It allows Kubernetes workloads to claim storage from NetApp backends — including ONTAP, SolidFire, and Cloud Volumes — using standard Kubernetes constructs such as PersistentVolumeClaim objects and StorageClass definitions.
By open-sourcing Trident, NetApp positioned itself as a contributor to the Kubernetes ecosystem rather than a closed-stack vendor, making it easier for DevOps and platform engineering teams to adopt NetApp storage without abandoning Kubernetes-native workflows.
HCI, FlexPod, and the On-Premises Angle
While Kubernetes itself is infrastructure-agnostic, the HCI model — where compute, networking, and storage are delivered as a single, software-defined appliance — aligns well with the Kubernetes operational model. Both lean on abstraction and software-defined resource management.
For on-premises deployments that needed validated reference architectures, NetApp offered FlexPod, a jointly engineered platform combining NetApp storage with Cisco’s Unified Compute System (UCS). The HCI-based Cloud Data Services extended this on-premises footprint to public clouds, where HCI architectures are already the dominant infrastructure pattern.
Hybrid Cloud Data Management: Still an Open Question
Even as of this 2019 announcement, the market for unified hybrid cloud data management was still taking shape. Most enterprise organizations were running workloads across multiple clouds, but those environments were largely isolated from one another — independent data planes, separate storage accounts, and minimal cross-cloud data mobility.
The longer-term concern driving NetApp’s strategy was vendor lock-in. As organizations grew more dependent on specific cloud providers’ proprietary storage services, migrating data or running applications across clouds became progressively harder. A common data fabric that abstracts storage across environments — on-premises HCI, AWS, Azure, GCP — was the architectural answer NetApp was proposing.
What remained unclear at the time was who would drive that convergence inside enterprises: traditional storage and infrastructure teams familiar with NetApp’s existing portfolio, or DevOps and platform engineering teams who were architecting container platforms from scratch and had different priorities around automation, self-service, and GitOps-style workflows.
Key Takeaways for DevOps and Platform Engineers
- Persistent storage for Kubernetes is not optional once stateful workloads enter the picture. Plan your StorageClass and CSI driver strategy early.
- Trident provides a Kubernetes-native interface to NetApp storage backends and is worth evaluating if your organization already uses NetApp infrastructure.
- HCI platforms can simplify Day 2 Kubernetes operations by providing tightly integrated compute and storage with unified management planes.
- Data portability across clouds requires a deliberate architecture decision — cloud-native storage services are convenient but can create migration friction at scale.
- CSI standardization is the correct abstraction layer to bet on; avoid storage integrations that bypass CSI in favor of vendor-specific volume plugins (now deprecated in Kubernetes).