NetApp, the Global cloud-led, data centric software firm has announced the general accessibility of NetApp Astra, a fully managed application-aware data management service developed for Kubernetes workloads. NetApp Astra enables organizations to protect, recover, and move applications deployed on Kubernetes with no software to download, install, manage, or even upgrade, thus enabling them to focus on developing and scaling their applications not on managing infrastructure.

Eric Han Vice President, Product Management, Public Cloud Services, NetApp says “Backup, cloning, disaster recovery, data lifecycle operations, data optimization, compliance, and security are all critical to any organization. Taken together, these challenges increase complexity. That’s directly at odds with Kubernetes’ goal of simpler, faster and more flexible application development and deployment – a vision that NetApp Astra will help to realize.”

With NetApp Astra, NetApp streched its industry-leading data management services into the Kubernetes ecosystem, to aid the organizations to manage cloud native applications and legacy workloads with key capabilities that include:

Data protection with snapshots: This enables the Teams to take snapshots for local data protection. Also, if the data is accidentally deleted or corrupted, the applications and associated data could be reverted to a previously recorded snapshot in the same Kubernetes cluster.

Disaster/data recovery with remote backups: This features allows the teams to take a full application-aware backup of an application and state. The backup can be used to restore the application with its data to a different Kubernetes cluster in the same or a different region to address data recovery use cases.

Simplified application portability and migration with active clones: With this the entire applications, along with their data, could be moved from one Kubernetes cluster to another, no matter where the clusters are located.

Currently supporting Google Cloud, NetApp Astra will soon support Microsoft Azure and AWS public cloud environments, and on-prem as well.

Rushi NS, Chief Architect, SAP says, “I applaud NetApp’s goal of providing application-aware data management for Kubernetes. Astra will make it dramatically easier to manage, protect, and move data-rich Kubernetes workloads across public clouds and on-premises. I look forward to collaborating with NetApp as they continue to develop Astra.”