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NetApp Solutions

TR-4919: DevOps with NetApp Astra

Contributors kevin-hoke
PDFs

Alan Cowles and Nikhil M Kulkarni, NetApp

Use cases

The DevOps with NetApp Astra solution is architected to deliver exceptional value for customers with the following use cases:

  • Easy to deploy and manage applications and development environments deployed on top of supported Kubernetes distributions.

  • Discussion of real-world use cases for DevOps workflows and examples of the tools and methods that NetApp can provide to make adoption and use of these methods easier.

  • Exploration of how application-consistent snapshot, backups, and clones can be used to enhance the DevOps experience.

Business value

Enterprises are increasingly adopting DevOps practices to create new products, shorten release cycles, and rapidly add new features. Because of their innate agile nature, containers and microservices play a crucial role in supporting DevOps practices. However, practicing DevOps at a production scale in an enterprise environment presents its own challenges and imposes certain requirements on the underlying infrastructure, such as the following:

  • High availability at all layers in the stack so that workflows are never interrupted.

  • Ease of deployment and management procedures for the end user.

  • API-driven and programmable infrastructure to keep up with microservices and developer agility.

  • Ability to scale infrastructure independently and in an automated fashion, based on workload demands.

  • Protecting applications alongside their backing persistent data sets for DevOps workflows accelerate time to market by not having to rely on redeployments or manual copying of data.

Recognizing these capabilities and challenges, this technical report outlines the process of improving and simplifying DevOps use cases for containerized applications using the wide portfolio of NetApp products.

Technology overview

The DevOps with NetApp solution contains the following major components:

DevOps practices

DevOps practices focus on automated, repeatable, and easily manageable operations that enhance the development workflow by allowing the end user to control the environment in which they are developing their code. This solution provides several examples and use cases in which NetApp technology can be of the greatest benefit to such operations.

Container orchestration

There are numerous container orchestration platforms in use today. Although most of these platforms are based on Kubernetes, each has pros and cons. So it is important to understand feature sets and integrations when selecting a container orchestration platform for DevOps workflows. With the NetApp Astra suite of products, we support the following platforms for full-fledged DevOps use cases:

NetApp storage systems

NetApp has several storage systems perfect for enterprise data centers and hybrid cloud deployments. The NetApp portfolio includes NetApp ONTAP, NetApp Element, and NetApp e-Series storage systems, all of which can provide persistent storage for containerized applications.

For more information, visit the NetApp website here.

NetApp storage integrations

NetApp Astra Control Center offers a rich set of storage and application-aware data management services for stateful Kubernetes workloads deployed in an on-prem environment and powered by trusted NetApp data-protection technology.

For more information, visit the NetApp Astra website here.

Astra Trident is an open-source and fully-supported storage orchestrator for containers and Kubernetes distributions like Red Hat OpenShift, VMware Tanzu, Anthos by Google Cloud etc..

For more information, visit the Astra Trident website here.