Original reporting: blocksandfiles.com. Original publication date: March 21, 2020.
NetApp Kills NKS on HCI and Cloud Volumes on HCI
In March 2020, NetApp announced it would end availability of two services — NetApp Kubernetes Service (NKS) on HCI and Cloud Volumes Service for On-Premises (Cloud Volumes on HCI) — effective April 20, 2020. The move was framed not as a retreat from Kubernetes, but as a strategic realignment toward a broader, distribution-agnostic approach to container orchestration across the company’s full product line.
According to a source close to the company cited by blocksandfiles.com, something new was already in preparation: “some very cool things in the works for NetApp and Kubernetes where there is more value than NKS was and is.” A formal announcement was expected within weeks of the initial disclosure.
Why NetApp Made the Change
NetApp’s customer communication at the time cited direct feedback from both partners and customers as a driver for the change. The company stated it would adopt a distribution-agnostic approach to Kubernetes, with the stated goal of making applications and their associated data highly available, portable, and manageable across on-premises infrastructure and public clouds — delivered through a software-defined set of data services.
The company was explicit that ending NKS on HCI and Cloud Volumes on HCI was intended to accelerate its Kubernetes strategy, not abandon it. The broader ambition was to transform its converged and hyperconverged storage platforms — including NetApp HCI — into a software-defined architecture capable of automating infrastructure for Kubernetes workloads, positioning NetApp as a leading on-premises hybrid cloud platform.
What NKS and Cloud Volumes Actually Were
NetApp Kubernetes Service (NKS)
NKS was a SaaS-based offering that allowed customers to provision and manage Kubernetes clusters across multiple environments:
- On-premises: NetApp HCI and FlexPod
- Public cloud: AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud Platform (GCP)
The provisioning workflow handled load balancer creation, virtual instance configuration, and full Kubernetes deployment and configuration across each node in the cluster. End users could then spin up cloud-native projects using standard Kubernetes tooling, including kubectl configuration files.
Critics noted that NKS operated primarily at the application layer and was in direct competition with platforms such as Red Hat OpenShift — a position that raised questions about strategic fit for a storage-focused company.
Cloud Volumes on HCI
Cloud Volumes is NetApp’s approach to delivering file services — consumable by containerized and cloud-native applications — within public cloud environments. Key variants include:
- Cloud Volumes ONTAP: The ONTAP storage operating environment running in AWS and Azure
- Cloud Volumes Service for GCP: A managed file service for Google Cloud
- Cloud Volumes Service for On-Premises / Cloud Volumes on HCI: The now-discontinued on-premises variant
The discontinuation of the on-premises variant was interpreted by some analysts as evidence that customers were not yet ready for — or simply did not require — a hybrid, on-premises Cloud Volumes capability, and were content to continue running traditional ONTAP appliances on-premises.
NetApp’s HCI Platform: The Underlying Infrastructure
NetApp’s hyperconverged infrastructure product at the time was NetApp HCI, built on the SolidFire Elements storage platform. The broader converged portfolio included FlexPod and FlexPod SF, both of which use Cisco servers and networking. These are reference architectures jointly developed and validated by NetApp and Cisco, rather than tightly integrated proprietary appliances.
Industry Reaction: Strategic Sense or Retreat?
The Case for Refocusing
Chris Evans, a prominent data storage architect quoted by blocksandfiles.com, argued that the core capability of NKS was never the issue. The real question was whether NetApp — fundamentally a storage and data management company — should be in the business of workload orchestration at all, or whether it should instead focus on making workload management tools work better with its data services.
Evans suggested the more appropriate path was the latter: retaining NKS-derived capability within NetApp’s Fabric Orchestrator strategy to handle data movement and migration, rather than maintaining it as a standalone Kubernetes management product. He noted that the ongoing cost and engineering effort of keeping pace with upstream Kubernetes development had clearly been weighed and found too high relative to the return.
Questions Around Cloud Volumes on HCI
Evans expressed more concern about the retirement of Cloud Volumes on HCI, noting that it seemed to work against a hybrid data strategy where storage is agnostic and distributed across many locations. The implication is that customers either weren’t adopting the product in meaningful numbers, or the operational model wasn’t compelling enough to justify the overhead of maintaining it.
Analyst Speculation on HCI’s Future
An unnamed industry analyst quoted in the original report suggested that NetApp could exit the HCI market entirely within 12 months of this announcement, with COVID-19 market conditions potentially serving as cover for a strategic withdrawal. That prediction was speculative at the time of writing and should be treated as such.
What This Signals for NetApp’s Kubernetes Direction
The clearest signal from the announcement was that NetApp was moving away from building and operating its own Kubernetes distribution or management layer — a position that put it in competition with established players like Red Hat OpenShift and VMware Tanzu — and toward a role as an infrastructure and data services enabler for whatever Kubernetes distribution a customer chooses to run.
This distribution-agnostic posture aligns more naturally with NetApp’s core competency: providing persistent, portable, highly available storage and data management services to applications, regardless of where or how those applications are orchestrated. Projects like Trident, NetApp’s open-source dynamic storage provisioner for Kubernetes, reflect this direction — operating at the storage layer beneath the orchestration tier rather than competing with it.
Key Takeaways for DevOps and Platform Engineers
- NKS on HCI and Cloud Volumes on HCI were discontinued effective April 20, 2020.
- NetApp’s stated replacement strategy centers on distribution-agnostic Kubernetes support across ONTAP and its broader portfolio.
- The move reflects a shift away from competing in the Kubernetes management layer and toward enabling persistent data services across any Kubernetes distribution.
- Cloud Volumes ONTAP (AWS, Azure) and Cloud Volumes Service (GCP) remained active; only the on-premises variant was discontinued.
- Teams running NKS on HCI at the time of the announcement needed to plan migration to an alternative Kubernetes distribution and storage integration layer.
This article is based on reporting by blocksandfiles.com from March 2020 and reflects the state of NetApp’s product portfolio at that time. Product availability and strategy will have evolved since publication.